


strike

by shuofthewind



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cormoran Strike Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amputee Cassian Andor, Awkward Flirting, Bodhi Is A Secret Hip-Hop Star Don't Judge Me, Cassian Andor: Competency Kink (TM), Cassian Andor: Maths Genius, Demisexual Demiromantic Cassian Andor, F/M, Greysexual Demiromantic Jyn Erso, Human K-2SO, Jyn Erso: Smarter Than She Thinks She Is, Jyn Has A Past, K-2: Done With All This, M/M, Murder Mystery, Rogue One Anniversary Celebration, Rogue One Is The A(ce) Team, So does Cassian, Some Of The Tagged Characters Are Dead But I Won't Tell You Which Ones Here, human droids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 09:13:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13004559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: Cassian Andor left Mexico and came to London hoping for a new start, but his private investigating business has failed, he's living out of his office, and he's probably going to wind up in the street in the next three weeks. Then a temp secretary he can't remember hiring shows up; an American exchange student asks him to look into her birth mother; and INTERPOL gives up trying to solve the murder of a diplomat-turned-Oxford-don. And that's the start.[ACormoran Strikefusion AU. Eventual Rebelcaptain. No need to have any awareness of theCormoran Strikenovels to read this.]





	strike

**Author's Note:**

> SOME NOTES: 
> 
> This is set in the UK, and thus words like "twat" are not as Terrible To Say as they are in the US. It's about the same level of crassness as "dick." 
> 
> Jyn swears in Danish because Mads is Danish, bite me. (Grazie to runakvaed for giving me a FANTASTIC DANISH SWEARWORD.) 
> 
> NONE OF THE MATH WILL MAKE SENSE. It's not being written to make sense. It's written for Cassian to jot down his thoughts in a way that nobody else can read. It makes sense to Cassian, and to me, so don't look for an actual solvable equation in any of this.
> 
> My Spanish is rudimentary and so if I have any errors let me know. Same with my discussion of living with an amputated leg; I've been researching all I can online, but as I'm an abled person, I will, invariably, fuck up somehow. 
> 
> Same goes for my discussion of: cartels, international legal work, Serbia, Croatia, etc. I will, invariably, fuck up, so correct me if I do it, I absolutely will not mind. 
> 
> As for the next chapter: I have my last final tomorrow, and then I go to my parents' house on Saturday, so it shooooould be up in the next few weeks. Fic should be done by the end of January. 
> 
> Happy Rogue One Anniversary Week!

_ Fuck,  _ Jyn thinks.

She looks at the paper in her hand, and then up at the set of buzzers again, just to be sure. Sure enough, the address matches, at least.  _ C.J. Andor, Private Detective.  _ Buzzer for the second floor. When the agency had called yesterday with a new assignment—”one week,” Karrde had said, sounding deeply unamused, “if you can spare the time”—she’d leapt at it, because her rent’s due, because she hasn’t been to Tesco’s in three days, because Bodhi’s coming home soon and she needs to at least pretend she has her life together when her miraculous brother gets home from abroad, but  _ fuck. A bloody private detective.  _ The last thing she needs is a week with a grungy, boozing prat who makes it his business to stick his greasy nose into other people’s private affairs. Judging from the hand-written note next to the buzzer, he’s not doing particularly well.  _ Probably snapping mobile pics of cheating spouses,  _ she thinks, and yanks the door open. She has to kick the bottom of the bloody thing to get the hinges to pop properly.  _ Fucking hell. _

A week, Karrde had said. Unless this bloke signed up to keep her on longer. She can handle a week, she’s fairly certain. She’d handled a week at the escort service, and that’d been a week of absolute raging hell, what with the johns asking if she was up for grabs, too. She can handle a week with a bloody private detective.

She thinks.

The building’s in disrepair. She’d not really expected better, not with the address right off of Denmark Place— _ bloody hell, there’s a bloody café right next door,  _ though that at least will do wonders to keep Bodhi from nagging her about breakfast in the mornings—but when she finds the elevator out of order she curses under her breath and marches up the metal stairs instead. Her smart shoes make the steps ring, like struck bells, and she regrets ever putting the fucking things on; they make her ankles hurt, make it hard to kick a man in the balls if she has to, but damn it, she’d been  _ trying  _ to look at least a little professional, even with the rings under her eyes from the under-the-counter waitressing gig that Mara had managed to snag for her. She’d only signed on to work until two, but she’d been stuck there until four cleaning up sick in the bathroom from a gaggle of soused teenagers, and ruined one of her good miniskirts by putting a knife through the hem, and now she’s stuck temping for a  _ bloody private investigator _ .

In her purse, her phone buzzes. Probably Bodhi. She flicks the thing onto silent, and shoves it back into her bag.

_ Beggars can’t be choosers, Jynny _ , says a voice in her head. It sounds remarkably like Magva.  _ Especially not a girl in your position. _

“I’m not in any position,” she says, and then bites her tongue when she realizes she’s talking to the staircase. Fucking hell.

There’s only one door on the second floor.  _ C.J. Andor,  _ it reads again, this time in frosted glass—must have been done before the debt collectors came knocking, she thinks, uncharitably, frowning at it—and beneath the name again:  _ Private Detective. _

_ Right. _

She reaches for the knob.

The door blasts open before she can blink. Fifteen years of training means she’s out of the way of the door before it can strike her in the face; the stupid bloody business heels mean her ankle goes sideways as she steps backwards. The heel of her right shoe snaps off. She gets a sudden flash of a face—not much of a one, just big dark eyes and parted lips—before she stumbles backwards and hits the guard rail. She bends. And bends further. Her feet slide out from under her.

_ Oh,  _ she thinks, first.  _ I’m going to fall.  _ Then, instead of screaming:  _ well, this is a pathetic way to die. _ Over the edge of a staircase and down to the ground floor to crack her head on the filthy tile.  _ I’m never wearing heels again.  _ Then:  _ Bodhi will be so upset with me. _

Something snags her wrist. A hand. Jyn screams, finally, or lets out a yelp at least, when whoever it is yanks hard enough to nearly pop her shoulder out of its socket. Her feet fly out from under her. She’s dangling, for a moment, from somebody’s hand, before she can catch herself. She grasps the railing with her other hand, and half the contents of her purse scatter across the floor.

“ _ Mierda, _ ” says a voice. Then: “ _ Puta madre,  _ Christ,  _ Jesus _ —”

“Shut  _ up _ , you utter arsehole,” Jyn snaps.  _ You’re not the one who nearly fell off the second floor.  _ She’s almost surprised when whoever it is actually shuts up. He holds onto her wrist until she’s back on her feet, and then he lets go. She can’t put weight on her ankle.  _ Fuck. Fucking hell.  _ “My ankle.”

He’s small, but not small. Slender, really. Tall—he has at least eighteen centimeters on her,  _ fucking hell _ —but he’s fine-boned, his face narrow and long. Thoughtful eyes. Guarded, she thinks, and then bats that away as fanciful. The man looks over her shoulder, as if he’s expecting to find someone else with her, and then says, “Come in. I have a first aid kit.”

“Fuck,” says Jyn. And her fucking shoe is broken on top of it all. She bends, and seizes her wallet off the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” says the man. He doesn’t sound Spanish. The accent is…wrong, somehow. Not Spanish or Portuguese. Well, Spanish, obviously—the swearing had been in Spanish—but not Castilian, anyway. There’s something different about his vocal patter. “I didn’t think anybody was out there. Nobody ever is.”

“Shit,” says Jyn. Her ankle  _ hurts.  _

“Here,” says the man, and then he offers his hand. Jyn looks at it, and then at him, and then grips his hand tight enough to make his bones ache, letting him take some of her weight. Odd lines cut deep around his mouth as he helps her inside, to a chair beside the door that has a few magazines sprawled across the seat. He knocks them aside for her, and then darts into a back room.

_ Current secretary?  _ No; he doesn’t look like a secretary. He’s…crumpled, somehow, at the edges, his shirt wrinkled, his trousers slept-in and turned up at the cuffs. He walks into the back room without thinking about it, without knocking or hesitating. Not the sort of behavior she’d ascribe to a secretary, or an assistant. She doubts this PI can even afford to  _ hire  _ an assistant. So he has to be Cassian Andor. Jyn hisses through her teeth, and draws her foot up into her lap. It’s swelling, and when she tries to point her toes, pain lances up through her leg to bite her in the ass.  _ Fuck. Did I break it?  _ She’s not sure. It doesn’t feel like the time she broke her wrist, at least, so probably not, but there’s always a question of fractures.

The man—Andor, presumably—melts back into the room, and drags another chair to sit across from her. “Sorry,” he says again, and settles with the first aid kit on one knee. His other leg stretches out awkwardly to the side, like he can’t bend it properly. “I really didn’t think anyone was out there.”

Jyn spits in between her teeth, and then says, “I’m your temp.”

Andor’s halfway through opening the first aid kit when he stops, and blinks. “What?”

“Temp,” says Jyn again. “Temporary Solutions. I’m the temp. I’m supposed to be here for a week.”

He blinks at her, blank-faced.

“A secretary,” she says.

“I know what a temp is,” Andor says. There’s a bite to his voice that wasn’t there before, and suddenly, startlingly, she feels guilty.  _ Bloody stupid of you, Jyn. _ Stupid fucking thing to say. “I just don’t remember hiring one.”

This time Jyn blinks. “Well, the call came in,” she says. “And I’m here for the week.”

They look at each other for a moment.

“I see,” he says, and then seems to dismiss the whole possible  _ I didn’t actually ask for this  _ issue with a twitch of his head. “May I check your ankle?”

“It’s not broken.” Not like her shoe.  _ Bloody hell, how am I supposed to afford new heels?  _ She can barely afford new  _ socks.  _ “It’s fine.”

“I have some medical training,” he says. “And if it’s broken, then you need the hospital.”

“It just needs ice.”

“I’d rather check,” he says. He looks grave. “Just in case. If you don’t mind.”

It’s not a question of minding, really. More a question of  _ what the hell is going on?  _ She looks about the room, trying to give herself time, trying not to look him in the face. Clean walls, neatly kept filing cabinets. The magazines on the coffee table are six months out of date. The front desk is a mess, old chocolate bar wrappers laid out beside the mousepad. It’s all she can make out from this angle, awkward as it is. When she looks out the still-open door, light flickers over the railing.

“Fine,” Jyn says.

Andor’s careful, she’ll give him that. He’s clinical, too, which is not what she expects from a penny-pinching voyeur. When she shifts her leg, puts her foot on his knee, he settles his hands on both sides of her ankle, pressing in with the tips of his fingers, pushing with his thumbs. She has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her face straight, to stop herself from flinching. He knows what he’s doing. He tests the bone the same way Baze would, pushing her foot back and forth, bending it to make sure everything works properly. Tears spring to the corners of her eyes, and she blinks them away before he notices.

“Sprain,” he says, finally. “I think.”

“You think.” She draws her foot back away from him, settles it on her knee. When she snags the wrap from the open first aid kit, Andor blinks, but doesn’t protest. “Cheers for that.”

“I really am sorry,” he says.

Her shoulder aches, too. Jyn doesn’t mention it. She winds the bandage around her ankle, over the arch of her foot, around and around.

“I can call a cab for you if you like,” says Andor. “I’d understand if you’d rather go home.”

She’s tempted, for a moment. Her one good pair of heels are bust, her ankle’s a mess, she’s stuck in a private investigator’s office, she’s exhausted, she’s frustrated, her teeth hurt, and she’s embarrassed, more than anything really. She looks at him for a second, trying to pick out a weakness, a hint of what he’s thinking. There’s nothing.

_ You need the money, _ her cold self says.

_ At least he hasn’t tried to look up your skirt yet, _ her wry self says.

_ Suck it up, _ says a voice that sounds like Saw.

“If you’re going to try and toss me off the second floor,” she says, “you owe me a week’s pay for it. I’ll stay.”

The corners of his mouth jump, just a bit. Andor looks at her, and then he stands, easing his weight up out of the chair like an old man would, bits at a time until he’s finally standing up straight.

“Right,” he says. Then again, as if to settle himself. “Right. Do you want coffee?” 

.

 

.

 

.

London had been good, in the beginning.

He’d been freshly discharged, when he’d first moved. Freshly released from  _ Fuerzas Especiales,  _ and with no idea what to do afterwards. Moving across the globe had given him something to work towards; starting a new business had given him something to wake up for. England is cold and bleak, the way he remembers it from when his mother would bring him to visit his aunts, his cousins. All of them are dead, now--plane crash, of all things--but there’s still traces of his old family here if he looks hard enough, and it’s why he picks London, a bustling city that’s nothing like  _ Chilangolandia  _ but somehow everything like it. Anonymous and noisy. The babble of English and Farsi and Urdu and half a million others make his head hurt, the first few weeks, but he sticks with it because it’s different, and because it’s far away, and because it helps, to be here. At least at first.

It says a lot about how much he’s slept recently that he can only barely remember placing an order for a temp. That, of course, had been back before the landlord had started calling him to remind him about the rent due in four days ( _ four days, ten hours, twenty seven minutes, _ his mind reminds him, and Cassian chases it away from him the way he would a rabid coyote); before he’d had to move out of his flat; before he’d started sleeping in his office between the few, unexceptional adultery cases he’d had to take on over the past six weeks. Unless he gets another grubby stalking case, he won’t be able to afford to pay her.  _ Think of that in a week. Think of that after the rent is handled.  _ He turns to the counter in the main room—his leg is bothering him, this morning, too much to hide the sway in his gait—and finds the coffee, sets the electric kettle on to boil. He only has dregs, in the coffee tin, barely enough to make a full pot, and not nearly as strong as he usually does. Still, it’s for the temp, and she’s English; he doubts she’ll even notice.

She’s swearing again, half under her breath. A chair scrapes. Then there’s the rattle of wheels across the floor—the wheeled chair, behind the front desk—and the crystalline crinkle of chocolate wrappers being tossed into the bin. She’s still muttering as she opens and closes the desk drawers, too low for him to make out.  

She would have caught herself, he thinks. If her heel hadn’t snapped. Good reflexes. And the muscle in her leg had been built, not just through walking and jogging but hard work. Some kind of martial arts, maybe. She’d glared at him like she’d wanted to take a knife to his face if he touched her wrong. He’s hired temps before, since he stopped being able to take care of his own paperwork (too little time), and none of them have quite been as ferocious as this one. Then again, he’d never tried to knock any of  _ those  _ temps over a stair railing to their deaths, so who knows what they might have done?

The kettle whistles. He snaps the thing off, and finds a clean mug in the sink.

The temp—hell, he doesn’t even know her damn name—has settled behind the desk like a dragon, sorting through the paperclips. She’s collected all the papers that he’d left there the night before, working in the front room, leaving the lights off and depending on the gleam of the streetlamps through the windows instead of trying to strain his eyes in the smaller, darker room that he’d claimed for his office, and settled them in a neat pile with a post-it on top already. She’s attacking the office supplies like a woman going into battle more than anything, and when he crosses back into the main room with a mug of coffee, she looks up at him and says, “Your filing cabinets are locked.”

Right. “Keys are in the bottom left-hand drawer,” he says, “in the kit,” and she nods once, sharply, before bending to collect them. She has the greenest eyes he’s ever seen, he thinks. More cat-like than human. It’s unnerving, almost. He shakes that thought out of his head too. “Mail comes in at about three o’clock in the afternoons, if we get anything. There’s an appointment program on the computer. Same with the budget, there’s—there’s a program on there.” And if she looks at it, she’ll see that he hasn’t been paid in three weeks, hasn’t had a client in two, and technically he shouldn’t have hired a temp in the first place, but he’d had too much to drink after his last payday and thought it would be better to have a friendly, English face at the front desk to greet all his  _ many  _ customers.  _ She’s English, at least. _ “If you have any questions, just knock on the door. Or shout. The walls are thin.”

“Right,” says the temp, with that cool, unruffled look on her face again. Like someone could smear egg on her and she wouldn’t notice. “Is there anything you need me to do right away, Mr. Andor?”

_ Maldito. _ “Cassian’s fine,” he says, and then feels stupid. His tongue has swollen up to twice its usual size.  _ Fucking hell.  _ “And—no, not today.”

She nods.

“Excuse me,” says a voice. American. Female. The half-open door creaks wide. He’d had his back to his office door, not the front, and that means he barely has to shift his leg at all to get a look at whoever’s standing there. She’s tiny, this woman. Sharp brown eyes. “Are you Cassian Andor?”

Cassian blinks, and his voice escapes him. The temp stands up behind her desk.

“Can I help you?” she says. She’s barely two fingers taller than the little woman in white, but the pair of them between them have more fire in the air than a house burning down. It’s like watching a pair of bobcats stand off. “Would you like to make an appointment?”

“I’d like to talk to Cassian Andor,” says the American woman, and one of her eyebrows tick up. “If he’s here.”

The temp looks at him, and waits.

“Yeah,” says Cassian, and wants to curse himself again. “Come on through.”

“Thank you,” says the American woman, and whatever happens behind his back, he doesn’t want to know.

He’d already hidden his duffel bag under his desk. Old habits, he thinks, from being in physical therapy. Tucking away anything that could trip him, butcher his chance at a quick recovery. He’d known there was no way he’d be going back into the field, not after what happened, but at the same time he’d been trying at least to recover as quickly as possible. He hates being still, and hospitals are enforced stillness. The American woman still looks around with about as much approval as a nun. He pretends not to be bothered by it. His desk is clean, much cleaner than it could be considering he’s slept here the last three nights, and if some white American woman is going to judge him for having a single coffee mug next to his computer, then she can bite her tongue on it and leave him be.

“I heard about you from my father,” is the first thing she says when she settles into the chair opposite him. She’s carrying a manila folder under her arm, and when she sits, she puts it in her lap, and smooths her manicured hands over the paper.

Cassian stops, halfway down into his own seat. “Your father?”

“Bail Organa,” she says. “He adopted me when I was a baby.”

Bail Organa. He has to wrack his brain, for a moment. Then— _ hola, capitán, comó estás _ , a man who could speak flawless Spanish even with his American roots, a neatly trimmed beard and fine, warm eyes. “I remember him,” says Cassian. “He visited Mexico City six years ago.”

“Then you haven’t heard,” says the woman, Bail’s daughter. She doesn’t hesitate. Her eyes are overbright, though, and her fingers clench. “He was murdered nine months ago.”

Cassian doesn’t know what to say.  _ I’m sorry  _ is never enough. Not when it comes to murder. “Did they catch the man who did it?”

“No.”

“Ah,” says Cassian.

“But that’s not why I’m here,” she says. She hesitates. “I’d like to find my birth parents. If I can. I heard about you from my father. I thought you might be able to help me.”

The door to his office opens, and the temp limps in (in flats; he’s not sure where she magicked them from, but at least she’s not barefoot, not in this office with broken glass swept into corners) with a…tray. Of coffee. With mugs he’s never seen before. And actual chocolate biscuits. She puts it on the desktop, along with a little bowl of disposable creamer containers and bits of sugar, and then looks at him, as if she’s daring him to argue with her. When neither of them say anything, she turns to go.

“Wait,” he says, and she turns. Cassian pulls his notebook off the desktop, scrawls quickly:  _ please look up Bail Organa & his role as American ambassador to Mexico, whether or not he adopted a daughter, her name, etc.  _ When he tears the paper out of the book and folds it up, the temp snatches it away from him, and limps back out into the main office. The door closes with a disturbingly quiet  _ snickt _ behind her.  __

Bail Organa’s daughter looks at him with a somewhat wry expression, and says, “Your secretary isn’t very friendly.”

“No,” Cassian says. “She never is.”

Outside, he hears a cabinet slam. For some reason, something tugs hard at his mouth. It might be half a smile.

“Good coffee though,” says Bail Organa’s daughter, and he blinks. Cassian cups the mug in his hands, breathes in the steam.  _ Strong coffee, _ like actual  _ café _ , and when he takes a sip— _ what did she even do?  _ He’s never tasted this kind of coffee before. It’s definitely not the bean he had in his staff room.

“Can I ask why you want to find your birth parents?”

Bail Organa’s daughter turns her mug in her hands. “My father would never tell me who my mother was,” she says. “I always knew I was adopted—my mother, Breha Organa, she was quite open about it. She said she’d had a handful of difficult pregnancies before they adopted me, that she’d probably never be able to have children of her own. That I was hers as much as any baby she could have carried. And I was content with that, for a long time.” She draws a breath, releases it. “When my father was murdered, I had to go through all his paperwork. And I found—papers that troubled me.”

Cassian doesn’t blink. He keeps his face smooth.  _ Don’t let anybody see your thoughts, or they’ll take them and carve them into blades.  _ “What kind of trouble?”

“Payments,” says Bail Organa’s daughter, blunt as a baseball bat. “I thought at first that they were bribes, but that—that’s nothing like my father. It’s nothing like the man I knew. He never used any of the money—he put it in trust, for me, for when I turn twenty-one—”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she says. “I was born May fourth, ninety-eight.”

He writes that down. “How much were the payments, exactly?”

“Seventy-five thousand pounds apiece,” says Bail Organa’s daughter. “Once a year since I was born. On my birthday.”

He writes that down too, and does some math in his head. “So at this point—”

“It’s over a million pounds.” She shifts, uncomfortably. “He never used any of the money, he just…set it aside for me. Some of the documents said that it was my inheritance from my mother—my birth mother, not my mother. I tried to trace the bank account, but it’d been put into trust, and it’s anonymous. I can’t get any information about the account holder from the bank. I can’t even learn her name from the birth certificate, it was clearly falsified.” 

“What’s the name?”

“Jane Martha Barrie,” she says. Her mouth twists. “So if you look at it with a squint—”

“J.M. Barrie.”  _ Peter Pan.  _ Clever, albeit a bit twisted. “I see.”  __

It stings her, Bail Organa’s daughter. It makes her ache to admit that. He can see it in the lines around her mouth when she frowns, the fierce frustration caught up in her eyes.

“Do you have any idea who she might be?”

“No,” she says.

The door opens again, and the temp glides back in, holding a piece of paper and an envelope. She hands both over to him, wordlessly, and vanishes back out the door. Cassian glances over the envelope—one of the bills, older, but a good enough excuse—and then sets it address-down on his desk before unfolding the note. In scratchy, angular handwriting, it reads:  _ Her name is Leia Organa. She was adopted by Bail and Breha Organa in June 1998, and she’s been part of photographs of the ambassador and his family throughout his career. Bail Organa served as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. from 1993 to 1999, and then the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 1999 to 2012. Before that, he worked in international law. Since he retired from his ambassadorial work he was teaching PPE at Oxford. His wife died in ’12, which is why he stopped working. He was murdered nine months ago. Home invasion that resulted in him being bludgeoned to death. Leia Organa is definitely the woman sitting in front of you. She has a bodyguard sitting out here and he keeps giving me dirty looks for cleaning out the crap the last temp left in this desk. You owe me 42p for the biscuits. _

Cassian looks at the note, and then crumples it up, and tosses it in the bin between his feet. It feels a little like he’s been smacked in the face with a fresh fish.

“I’m here because I’m studying abroad at the University of London, and I remembered—he mentioned that you’d come out here, after you retired, and I figured you might be able to help me.” Leia wets her lips. “I don’t know if you can, but I thought I might as well ask. He lived in London when I was born, and I think—I think he and Mamá must have adopted me here. I could never find any paperwork, though. And I don’t know where he would have hidden it.”

That would be in line with Organa’s work schedule. It’s also possible he picked up the child somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe—he wouldn’t be the first man with money and means to wander into Romania or Bulgaria or Estonia and come back with a child, bought and paid for—but he’s not going to tell Leia Organa that to her face. Cassian nods, and considers.

“I don’t know if you’re too busy,” she says, “and I know that this happened nineteen years ago, so there’s very little chance that you can find anything. But I’m willing to pay you, and I have the  _ money _ to do it, and I’d—I’d like to know who my parents were, Mr. Andor. I’ve lost one set, and if I have one parent still living, I’d rather know who they are than not have anyone at all.”

She keeps her face tight and controlled. A politician’s daughter, Cassian thinks. Of course she would.

“I can’t promise anything,” he says. “And I don’t think it would be right to let you go into this without saying that I probably won’t be able to find anything.”

“I don’t care,” says Leia. “I just want to know someone’s trying.”

He nods. “Do you have anywhere for me to start? A name, an old photograph? Anything at all could be helpful.”

Leia hesitates. “There weren’t a lot of people that Papá kept in touch with, after Mamá died. Not many of his friends in Oxford knew him for more than a few years, and he wouldn’t have told them anything.”

Cassian nods.

“The one person I can think of is his—well. I suppose you could call him an old work friend. Ben Kenobi. I’m afraid I don’t know if he’s even still alive, though. I’ve certainly never met him. If my father was still in contact with him, I haven’t found any evidence of it.”

“Spell it?”

She does— _ K-E-N-O-B-I _ —and he shuts his notebook afterwards.  

“I can pay you for a month’s work in advance,” says Leia, and suddenly his head is  _ swimming.  _ A month— _ puta madre. _ A  _ month’s  _ work in advance. He can pay off the outstanding rent, pay for the temp, buy food for the week, Jesus Christ, that’s more than enough to solve all his problems, but that’s a  _ terrible reason  _ to take a case like this,  _ think, Cassian, think, there’s no way you can solve this, it’s too long-dead, there’s no possible way _ — “If you don’t find anything in three weeks’ time, we can reevaluate.”

He looks at her, and doesn’t speak. Leia Organa stands up. She draws a checkbook out of her bag, writes out a number, tears it off and hands it to him. She hands him fifty pounds in cash, too, and Cassian can’t speak. He’s not sure he can even breathe.

“My father had faith in you,  _ capitán, _ ” she says. Her eyes say,  _ Don’t make me regret this. _

“ _ Lo siento tu pérdida _ ,” says Cassian, and her mouth twists.

“ _ Yo también _ ,” she says. She lays the manila folder on his desk with careful reverence, and sweeps out the door. He gets the merest glimpse of her bodyguard, a very tall, very hairy man with arms that seem just a smidgeon too long, before they sweep out of the office and shut the door carefully behind them.

The temp limps forward into his office, and looks at him.

“So?” she says. Her voice is sour. “Am I staying?”

Cassian looks down at the fifty pounds in his hands, and then peels off three of the five bills, offering it to her. The temp looks at him, and then at the money in his hand, before taking it.

“For the office tin,” he says.

“I figured,” says the temp.

“What’s your name?” Cassian says, and the temp stops. Her green, green eyes take on a sharp edge.

“Jyn,” she says. “Erso.”

He almost says  _ like the drink?  _ and then bites it back just in time. The sour look on her face is practically daring him to make the joke, so she can snip his head off for it with her fingernails. Or maybe her teeth. Her nails are chopped brutally low. “How do you spell it?”

Her eyes get sharper. “Why?”

“I need it for the books.”

She does not relax. Nor does she look any less suspicious. “J-Y-N. Last name E-R-S-O. But you’ll be paying Temporary Solutions, not me directly. Or didn’t Mr. Karrde mention that part?”

“Right,” he says, and doesn’t write it down.  _ Erso doesn’t sound very English, _ he almost says, but she sounds as English as they bloody come, so who knows what the story is there. “No, he did. I just forgot. Where did you get the coffee?”

“I stole it from the real estate office downstairs,” she says, without fluttering an eyelash, and Cassian nearly chokes on his sip from the mug. She looks oddly pleased with herself, to get a reaction. “It’s their own fault for leaving the door unlocked.”

“Is that why I owe you forty-two pence?”

“No. I bought the biscuits from the café.” She must have run to get them, he’s never been able to get in and out of that café in less than ten minutes, but then again, she has the advantage of being able to take the stairs three at a time if she needs to. Or she would, if not for her ankle.  _ So she just moves quickly. _ And she’s already more innovative than any other temp he’s ever met. Cassian looks down at the tray, and wonders if he’s hallucinating. It wouldn’t surprise him.

“Right,” he says. He digs into his pocket, finds fifty pence. “I don’t need the eight back.”

She takes it, and shoves it into the pocket of her cardigan.

“There’s—there are non-disclosure agreements in the top right hand drawer of the desk out there. If you could sign one, that would be helpful.”

Jyn nods, and watches him. A bobcat’s the right word for her, he thinks. Wary and bright-eyed and ready to snarl.

“I’m going out.” He heaves himself to his feet again. His leg aches. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. Um, there are keys to the front door in the—”

“—tin,” she says. “I found them.”

“Good,” says Cassian. He feels stupid as he seizes the manila folder, tucks it under his arm. “Excellent. If I’m not back before six, lock up, please.”

“Can do,” she says.

He absolutely doesn’t run from his office. He just leaves very quickly, and pretends he’s not biting his tongue hard enough to bleed as he limps down the stairs.

.

 

.

 

.

She cleans up. There’s a whole filing cabinet drawer filled with death threats, and she spends the morning reading through some of those, picking through some of the most creative discussions of emasculation she’s ever seen in her life and filing them away in the back of her head to yell at the gym when she has to. They’re all on pink paper with kittens in the corners, and all of them are signed  _ yr particular friend, _ though what’s particular or friendly about threatening to cut a man’s balls off and make him chew them up with sausage and grits is a mystery to her. She creates a new file, too, for Leia Organa, leaves it empty and open on his desk with a few printed-out pages on Bail Organa’s background clipped to the interior. (She marks out the forty-two pence in the budget program under  _ Office Expenses _ , winces at the amount of red, winces again at the amount that he  _ hasn’t  _ input, and then closes out of it before she has to reasonably inform Talon Karrde that this PI probably isn’t going to pay anytime soon.) Then she organizes everything she can, alphabetizes the files that haven’t already been alphabetized (not many; he keeps his files strictly ordered, this Cassian Andor, she has no clue why he needs a temp at all with the office the way it is), and signs the NDA, leaving it on Andor’s desk once she’s sure he’s not going to come back.

There’s a duffel bag under his desk. She looks at the door, just once, before yanking it out and unzipping it, picking through the contents. Clothes, mostly. A shaving kit. A book of history in Spanish that’s marked to hell. He writes in pencil, she notes, and his handwriting in Spanish is just as neat and orderly as it is in English.  _ Just in case he ruins his clothes? _ No, but there are too many clothes in it for that.  _ Maybe he’s homeless. _ It would match up with the finances. She locks down whatever she might think about that, shoves it away in a box in the back of her head. At the very bottom of the bag he has a gun, well-tended and recently cleaned but without bullets. There are none in the bag. There’s a knife, too, in one of the outside pockets. His clothes are folded so neatly there has to be some kind of military background, especially with the boots tucked discreetly in the corner, their laces still tied and tucked into the tops. Jyn settles the duffel bag back into order, zipping it closed and tucking it away under the desk. 

Her phone, in her cardigan pocket, buzzes.

_ New message from: Bodhi _

_ Going to be home in two days. Just until Fri morn, but I only have one concert, so I’ll kip on your couch if that’s all right before I head out to Cardiff. All okay w/you? _

Jyn sends him a string of emojis—devil face, bowfingers, poo pile, snoring smiley—and then tucks her phone back into her cardigan to dick around online until her personally established lunch hour.

It’s only once she comes back to the second floor office, settles back into the creaking chair behind the front desk and surveys her new territory, that she lets herself think.

She’d been able to hear the interview—honestly, she’s surprised that a private detective wouldn’t have found an office with thicker walls, just for privacy’s sake—and now she’s…not sure.  _ Not sure? Of course you’re sure. _ Finding out a woman’s parentage without a birth certificate or a name or anything, nineteen years on with both adoptive parents dead, one murdered— _ fuck. _ There’d been bits of Spanish, too, and mention of Mexico (which explains his accent, at least)— _ who the bloody hell is this bloke, anyway?  _ She’s not sure anymore, and she doesn’t  _ like  _ not being sure. Not about someone she has to tolerate for a full damn week.

She brings up Google.

Bail Organa, at least to her suspicious eye? Is clean. Well, as clean as she can determine from five hours of reading through his scant internet presence. There’s much more coverage of his murder than there is on anything else.  _ Bail Organa, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, murdered in his own home in Oxford on 17 February. Thames Valley Police have handed over the investigation to INTERPOL. Mon Mothma, speaking on behalf of INTERPOL, claims that there is so far no links to any terrorist organization currently at work in the U.K., though “nothing at this point is being taken off the table.” _

_ So they know sod-all _ , Jyn thinks, and keeps scrolling.

Seventeenth of February, research assistant, unnamed, comes poking around after two days of no contact with her boss to find the ex-ambassador dead on the floor with his skull cracked open, brains spilling all over his nice Persian rug. Dead thirty-six hours with no one to notice.  _ Having been widowed several years before, and with his daughter attending university in London, the former ambassador lived alone, and served as a visiting professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Christ Church College.  _ There’s an article about a little shrine people set up for him on the campus of Christ Church; photos of a smiling man in don’s robes with students clustered around him; photos again from his ambassadorial days, with a small, grave-faced Leia Organa standing between him and his wife; a website run by Interpol asking for tips, still, seven months on. An article released two months ago.  _ INTERPOL investigation stalls in murder of ex-ambassador.  _ No motive, no means. Nothing. They don’t even have a bloody lead, from what she can see.

Jyn taps her fingernail against the desktop. She pulls out her phone.

_ New message to: Bodhi _

_ u still talk 2 ppl @ christ church/in ppe program? _

She’s printing out articles and phone numbers when her phone buzzes again.

_ New message from: Bodhi _

_ Yeah, why? _

_ need 2 talk 2 someone abt bail organa, _ she types out, and then hesitates. She’s a temp, and she could get fired for looking into this on her own. Her throat closes up a little. She could get tossed out on her ear, and she needs the paycheck from Temporary Solutions to pay her rent this month, she really does. And there’s no  _ reason _ for her to look into this, either. It’s not as though she knew Bail Organa, or Leia Organa, or anyone else; she’s not been back to Oxford in years; there’s no fucking  _ reason  _ she should even be interested in this. If she sits behind the desk for a week, does the bare minimum and spend the rest of the time cruising news sites— _ not about this _ —then she’ll be free, and never have to think about this again.

_ He died last year. He was murdered. _

_ My father is dead. He’s been dead for fifteen years. He’s never coming back. My mother was murdered. She’s been dead for fifteen years. She’s never coming back. _

Jyn knocks her phone into the edge of the table a few times.

_ New message to: Bodhi _

_ work stuff _

_ New message from: Bodhi _

_ Thought you were temping still???? Are you getting back into PPE???? JYN!!!!! _

She pokes her tongue through her teeth.  _ Damn it, Bodhi. _

_ New message to: Bodhi _

_ stop asking stupid questions twatwaffle _

_ New message from: Bodhi _

_ We’re talking about this when I get there. _

“Of course,” she says to the empty room. “ _ Røvbanan _ .”

The next text is full of phone numbers and email addresses, old names she’d half-forgotten, faces that are fogged out in her memory. She writes them down in the notebook she always keeps in her purse, snags the paperwork out of the printer, and folds it all down into the base of her bag, as if stuffing it into the bottom of her purse will hide the fact that she’s being an idiot from all and sundry.

_ He died last year. He was murdered. _

_ Did they catch the man who did it? _

_ No. _

She misses her train by three minutes, waits for the next one with her clunky headphones over her ears and her ankle throbbing like a heartbeat, even with all her weight rested on her opposite leg.

Jyn has been and always will be a solitary creature. They’d taken the piss out of her at Oxford for it. Well, Bodhi had, sometimes, but that had always been affectionate teasing more than anything, her older brother flinging an arm around her neck and scruffing her hair with his knuckles, delighting in being taller than her, in being free and brilliant and far too popular. Even before she’d fallen into the care of her godfather, Jyn had never been particularly friendly with other people, and she has no reason to do so now; she’s not lonely, she has no need for more friends, and in all honesty, she doesn’t have enough patience to cultivate new relationships anyway. People cost time and money and emotion, and none of those are things she can afford to spend. Living alone in London  _ might  _ not be the best idea she’s ever had, but kicking the sticky door open and finding no one in her place is honestly the most soothing thing she’s ever had to herself, and she won’t give it up for anything at all.

She feeds the cat, treks out to practice—Baze would no more let her get away with missing boxing practice than she would herself—and comes back to her flat two hours later, her knuckles buzzing, her arms and shoulders aching in the good clean way that comes from decent work. Chirrut had been there, for the first time in three weeks. He’d gone back to China for a while, to visit old friends, or so he’d said, and Baze had been fretting the entire time he’d been away.

(“I’m fine,” Chirrut had said, when Jyn had arched her eyebrows at him. She’s still not sure how he always knows. “Someone had to stay to watch the studio. Baze just worries.”

“Of course I worry,” Baze had said. “You’re a moron.”

“He who follows a moron lies in his own shit,” Chirrut had said, cheerfully, and flashed his wedding ring. “Stop fussing.”)

By the time she thinks to call the Thames Valley Police Department, it’s nearly ten in the evening, the cat’s curled up on her lap, and she’s gone through half a bottle of wine by herself, trying to pretend she’s not being a fucking idiot. She swears under her breath, and the cat—Jyn’s never managed to get around to thinking up a name for the damn thing, just calls the beast  _ moggie _ and pretends not to be pleased whenever he claws his way up onto the couch to leave his massive weight spread across her legs—lifts his head to glare at her with pus-yellow eyes.

“Sorry,” Jyn says to the cat.

The cat makes an unhappy sound, and then lays his head down again.

She doesn’t pull the emails out of her bag. It sits, squatting like a little gremlin, in the corner of the sofa. Jyn watches it for a while, as if watching it will eventually trigger some kind of explosion that will kill her and keep her from having to answer stupid questions she asks herself at midnight. She falls asleep there, watching it, and the bag wends and winds and twines into her dreams, into the dumpster and the lid and the bright sky shining through. 

When she wakes up with nightmares at three in the morning, she almost welcomes it.

.

 

.

 

.

Cassian starts somewhere, at least. He books into a booth in an internet café (ignoring the up-and-down look from the man behind the counter, eyeing the limp and his unshaven face, pretending not to hear the muttered “don’t fookin’ sleep in here, mate”) and settles in. In theory, he really should be doing this at the office, but if Cassian’s going to be honest with himself—rare enough as it is—the new temp unnerves him. He’ll get more work done in an internet café than he will at the office, at least for today.

It’s with bad coffee and a stale croissant coagulating in his stomach that he opens up the manila folder that Leia Organa left on his desk, and starts going through the papers. There’s a photocopy of her birth certificate,  _ Father: unnamed, mother: Jane Martha Barrie _ . Date and place of birth: 01:21 A.M., 4 May 1998. Royal London Hospital. The informant’s name is scratched and somewhat faded, but he thinks the last name might be  _ Minnow.  _ Or  _ Minnau. _ He’s not quite sure. He writes that down in his notebook. If the name of the mother is fake, logic says, then the name of the informant is also probably fake, but he has to look into it, on the off-chance someone had been sloppy. That, at least, he should do, if nothing else.

The next piece of paper is bank records. Short and to the point. Transactions from one anonymous bank account to the private account of one Bail Organa. Current total: ₤1,425,000, give or take a few hundred, just to be safe. His eyes hurt, looking at it. He writes:

 

 

beside the ₤1,425,000 total, and then adds  _ preplanned or deposited personally?  _ beneath the equation. The only way he’ll be able to find that out is to examine the bank records, and the only way he can do  _ that  _ is to bother Kei. Considering the last thing Cassian had asked for help with had nearly had Kei cited, he can’t imagine Kei would be too enthusiastic about the prospect.

The bank account, at least, has a bank  _ name  _ attached to it. Swiss. ₤75,000 a year for nineteen years, and the Swiss are notorious for not wanting to let anybody know anything. Cassian bites his tongue. That amount of money deposited on the same day every year (4 May, Leia Organa’s birthday) as something which could, presumably, act as a birthday gift, from either a dead or absent parent. But if a dead or absent parent has that much money and  _ wanted  _ to give that much money to a child, why put that child up for adoption?

_ Personal knowledge?  _ he writes, and then underlines it twice.

_ Minnau  _ is a dead end. So is Minnow. He didn’t expect to find anything with either name. Jane Martha Barrie is a pseudonym, so too, probably, is Minnau, but at least he tries every possible combination he can think of with Minnau in a Google search box— _ Minnau and Bail Organa, Minnau and 1998, Minnau and adoption,  _ Minnau just on its own which produces over 856,000 results—before giving up on that, and leaving it for a later date. He searches  _ Jane Martha Barrie  _ too, just to confirm, and gets multiple counts of  _ did you mean J.M. Barrie _ ? before giving up that as well. Adoption records are sealed; he doesn’t have access to them; and even if he did, Bail and Breha Organa had been American citizens, and thus completely beyond his purview.

The booth he’s rented for the next two hours is soundproofed, and smells of bleach. Probably meant to clean up after men who come in here to jack off to pornography without getting caught by their wives or mothers back at home, he thinks. Or girlfriends or boyfriends or husbands. Who knows. He still pushes the chair as far away from the desk as possible, and rubs absently at the stump of his leg. He doesn’t remember much of Bail Organa, beyond that first greeting. An American ambassador with fluent, fluid Spanish, listening quietly to a classified presentation on current infiltration operations inside the Sinaloa Cartel and the intelligence being gathered in regards to US-Mexican drug smuggling. Cassian had been the only junior officer invited to attend—his CO had been called away suddenly to a meeting outside of Culiacán—and he’d stood in the back, listening and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Organa’d said little, asked several questions (in Spanish, which had surprised the presenters) and then left again. It would have been 2011, he thinks. The year before Organa retired as an ambassador, and two before Cassian had lost his leg.

He taps at the bleached desk for a minute, for two. He’d been in the same room with the man for five minutes, not nearly long enough to make an impression, and never spoken with him again, but Bail Organa had remembered  _ him  _ well enough to mention Cassian’s name to his adopted daughter. Cassian’s not sure he enjoys this feeling, the awareness that someone had noticed him. He’d spent his whole career learning how  _ not  _ to be noticed. It had been what had attracted the attention of Fulcrum in the first place, how he’d been recruited to the Navy and then to FES. He’d made his living in being forgettable, and now he himself has been forgotten, on a foggy island nation thousands of miles from a home he can’t return to. Except, apparently, by Bail Organa.

He logs in to Skype.

It rings for a long time. The dialogue box of  _ Would you like to leave a message?  _ has popped up by the time Shara finally answers, and immediately, Cassian realizes: it’s eleven AM in London, which means it’s roughly five in the morning in Arizona, and Shara looks it. Her hair’s down, and tangling around her face. Someone’s punched her in the eye, and the shiner’s still fresh and swollen.

“Andor,” she says, after a moment. “Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?”

Cassian says, “Sorry,” and fidgets with the mouse. “I’ll call back.”

“No, fuck it.” She looks back over her shoulder, and says, “Kes, Jesus, move,” before shoving her husband’s arm off her and crawling out of bed. He feels like a spy, an intruder. He shouldn’t be seeing this. Cassian looks up at the ceiling until he hears a door close, and a light switch flick on. Shara’s in a kitchen, now, or what looks like a kitchen. There are cabinets and a bad electric light in the background, peeling walls and a poster tacked up by a dark window. A movie poster, maybe. It’s too big to be anything else.

“Sorry,” says Cassian again, when something clatters.

“Jesus,” says Shara again. She puts her phone down, and all Cassian can see is the glare of the bad lighting. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, her voice echoing oddly. “Besides, I needed to get up to run, anyway.”

“Right.” Shara’s a teacher on the Fort Huachuca Air Force Base, now, outside of Tucson. He remembers that much. “I had a few questions. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Apologize to Kes, not me. He only made it back from Afghanistan two days ago.”

She means it just how it sounds, but still, Cassian bites the inside of his cheek. He hadn’t even known Kes Dameron had been deployed again. “Oh.”

“What is it, Cassian?” A clatter, a beep, and then Shara’s collected the phone again. She sits down. She’s put her hair up, and thrown a jacket on over her tank top. The purple matches her black eye. “You wouldn’t call if it weren’t important.”

His leg aches. “You remember Bail Organa?”

Shara’s quiet for a while. Her eyes narrow, and then widen again, a tell she used to be able to hide. “Jesus,” she says. “Been a while since I thought about the Ambassador. Why are you asking?”

“Case.”

“You know he’s dead?”

“Yeah, that’s not the case.” The buzz of the light in his soundproof booth is bothering him. Scraping away between his teeth like a popcorn kernel. “You worked the Embassy for a while.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like we were friends. I just hung around and flew people in and out as necessary before I went back out on deployment.” Shara blows a strand of hair out of her eyes, tucks it behind her ear. “Why are you asking?”

“Background.” He taps his pen against his notebook. “I only met him once.”

“Mm.” There’s a shuffling sound, and then in the corner of the feed Cassian catches sight of Kes Dameron, hair still buzzed down low, kissing the top of Shara’s head and making his way out of line of the camera again. “Nice enough guy. Polite. Ran a tight ship. Never made me feel like a bus driver. Personally I spoke to the wife and daughter more. Little girl was really interested in a lady pilot.”

That doesn’t surprise him, considering Leia Organa’s dagger eyes. “Right.”

“Mother was old money, Organa one of those politicians that clawed up from the bottom of the heap. Parents were Puerto Rican, he won a scholarship to Columbia Law, met his wife there, blah blah blah. Adopted the little girl. Something medical there, I think. Neither of them hid it. Wife did a lot of work with international law while she was there. I think she died the last year he was there. I was back in Iraq by then, so I have no idea how or why.”

Cassian runs a google search, and then says, “Cancer,” very shortly.

“Makes sense.” Shara lifts her face, and when she looks down at the phone again, she’s holding a cup of coffee in both hands. “You wanna explain to me what this is about?”

“A case,” he says. “Like I said.”

“Your firm go international without me looking?”

Cassian says, “Leia Organa turned up. Said her father mentioned me. Wants me to look into something.”

Shara says, “Ah.”

“Organa have anyone he was particularly close to? Doesn’t matter who. Any name.”

“I don’t know, Cassian, I’m sorry. Like I said, I wasn’t particularly close to the guy.” Shara sucks her teeth. “I can tell you that he did get along well with his head of security. Guy named Antilles. You might be able to get into touch with him, I don’t know where he was assigned after Organa gave up the ambassador game. I can probably reach out.”

“If you could.”

“Yeah, I’ll try. Like I said, I don’t know where he was assigned. Guy could be dead by now, for all I know. Those security guys get around.” She sips her coffee, and then leans back in her chair. “You look like shit, Cassian.”

“Haven’t been sleeping well,” he says. It’s not a lie. It’s just not the truth, either.

“ _ No mames,  _ asshole,” says Shara. “You haven’t called in eight months and it looks like you’ve lost twenty pounds. Your cheekbones are slicing right through your goddamn face.”

“English food is disgusting.”

“You still have to eat, moron. Won’t do anyone a damn bit of good if you faint from malnutrition. I’ll have to take a leave of absence and fly out there to grab your skinny ass and force a casserole down your throat.”

“I’m fine,” Cassian says. He’s never been quite sure how to take Shara’s brand of affection. He’s never been quite sure why Shara  _ offers  _ him her brand of affection. They’d worked one op together seven years ago, and she’s been a burr in his sock ever since. “How are you?”

“Bored out of my fucking mind.” Shara leans back. “Jolly Old England looks like it’s killing you slowly.”

“Why do Americans call it that?”

“I don’t know. It’s what they say on TV.” She looks off-camera. “Kes, you want to say hi?”

“Tell him he’s a motherfucker,” Kes says. “Could’ve waited two hours.”

“Sorry,” says Cassian again.

“You’re a lazy bastard anyway,” says Shara fondly.

“I was promised copious amounts of sleep and copious amounts of sex upon my return,” says Kes. “I’ve received neither of those so far.”

“Glue your trap.”

“I should go,” says Cassian. He taps his pen against his notebook again, and then writes:

 

_ C = ANTILLES; X = KENOBI _

 

 

into the middle of the page. “I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

“Oh.” Shara’s mouth turns down. She sighs through her nose. “Right. Sorry. I’ll call you soon, hey? Make sure they’re feeding you.”

“Yeah.” Cassian taps the pen. “Sure.”

“Cassian,” says Kes, and leans down, settling his head on Shara’s shoulder. He’s bruised, too, but shrapnel-flecked, not training-clipped. He says, “Oorah.”

Cassian salutes, feeling awkward and stunted, and then hangs up the call. Then he collects his things—the receptionist gives him another filthy glare on the way out—and makes for the nearest pub. For some reason, talking with Kes and Shara Dameron always makes him need a drink.

It’s easier to deal with Kei. Not what most people would say, but then again, most people take Kei at face value, and forget everything else. He’d come across Kei in one of his first cases, a tech analyst for the Metropolitan Police who lived in a little nook off the Baker Street tube station, six-foot-seven and permanently hunched from all his days spent craning to get a better look at his multiple computer screens. They’d bonded—unexpectedly on Kei’s part, more than a little intentionally on Cassian’s—over being foreigners in a land built on the backs of foreign nations, Kei Singaporean and a transplant to London because of reasons he won’t go into, Cassian with only the most tenuous of connections to the UK before flying out here to escape a home he can never go back to. Cassian’s sure that if he asked, directly—if anyone asked directly—Kei would be quite willing to tell his entire life story. He’s just not sure anyone could survive the sarcasm that would be guaranteed to come along with it.

“You still haven’t paid me for the last one,” Kei says, instead of hello, but he doesn’t argue any further than that. Whatever the Met’s having him work on must be boring him, if there’s that little fight about taking on another job before the last one’s paid.

“It’s only one thing, this time,” Cassian says, and then taps his pen against his notebook. “Maybe two.”

Kei sighs, and static rushes over the connection. “I do have a full-time job. You do realize this. You must, considering it involves a badge.”

“If you don’t have time, just tell me, Kei.”

“If I let you do it on your own you’ll just get yourself shot,” Kei says. “What is it this time?”

“Cracking a Swiss bank account to get account holder details,” Cassian says.

“Oh,” says Kei. “So something terribly simple.”

“How long will it take?” Cassian says. He leans back in his booth, and ignores the look from one of the bartenders at his accent.

“I have told you before that I do not work well with time constraints.” Kei makes a peevish noise, like two gears grinding together. “If you have promised something to this client of yours—”

“Relax. I was just wondering.”

“I am fully relaxed,” says Kei, still peevish. He’s always peevish. It’s just a matter of degree, with him. “You just have an idiotic tendency to make promises that you are not always able to keep.”

“Is this about Wobani again?”

“It  _ is _ why DI Draven will no longer speak to you, you know,” says Kei. “I believe the colloquial phrasing is  _ you bollocksed that up, mate. _ ”

“I gave Draven his murderer,” says Cassian. “It’s his fault he couldn’t make the charge stick before the fucker hanged himself.”

“You bollocksed up getting any Met officer to ever speak to you again, is what I meant. No police officer likes to know that contact with you will get his face plastered onto the front page of the  _ Daily Mail  _ for ineptitude.”

“Maybe if they hadn’t been inept, it wouldn’t have happened.” Cassian nods once to the woman who brings him his pint— _ warm beer,  _ he still doesn’t understand the English fascination with warm beer—and draws a circle in the condensation left from his old glass on the tabletop. There’s a cluster of American tourists giggling over in the corner and making noise about Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters. It’s going to give him a headache soon enough. “Someone had to say something, Kei.”

“You still rubbed their noses in it,” says Kei. “Nobody at the Met takes kindly to that.”

“It was their own damn fault.”

“ _ I  _ know that,” says Kei. “We all  _ know  _ that. That doesn’t mean any of them like to  _ hear  _ it.” Almost grumpily, he says, “And now nobody will give you information anymore but me, and it’s ruined your client list.”

“I didn’t have much of a client list before then.”

“But the Met provided roughly sixty percent of your client referrals. Now you are in debt and you only have yourself to blame.”

Cassian glares at his empty pint glass, and says, “This isn’t why I called you.”

“You’re quite sure this is all the information you have? The routing number and the bank name?”

“Do I need get you more?”

“No. It will just take more time. The Swiss are quite strict about what information they keep available online, and obviously I cannot do this with any legal weight behind me.” Kei hums, and then says, “I will need a week.”

A week isn’t…bad. Better than he’d expected. “Works for me.”

“You sound disturbed.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Is your leg bothering you?”

“No,” says Cassian shortly. “Just had a late night.”

There’s a noise like carbonation—Kei, draining the last of whatever noxious soda he’s taken to this week—and then a sigh. “You’d think that ruining your own business would be enough self-inflicted punishment for you.”

“Sure, Kei.”

“Your medical status is of a certain amount of importance to me,” says Kei, nasal. “You provide conundrums that actually match my intellect.”

“And he’s humble, too,” says Cassian, dryly. A thought strikes him, and he hesitates. “You know anyone at Births, Deaths, and Marriages who might be willing to talk to me?”

“No,” says Kei shortly. “But I am accustomed at walking in their digital back doors. What do you need?”

_ Jane Martha Barrie is a pseudonym. But _ — “All baby girls born on the fourth of May, 1998 at the Royal London Hospital. I want to see if the record I have is a forgery. Double-check every name on the certificate if you have the time. The one I’m looking at is for Leia Organa—” he spells it, and waits for Kei’s little noise of agreement before continuing “—but I have no idea if it’ll be in the system.”

“Right.” Kei’s pause could drown a sailor. “Are you going to tell me what this is regarding?”

“In a week,” says Cassian. “Yavin all right?”

“I will text you when I am ready to meet,” says Kei, and then hangs up. Kei never says hello, or goodbye; greetings waste time, according to him. Cassian taps the edge of his phone with his forefinger, and then leaves it on the tabletop, takes a sip of his warm beer and wishes it were late enough in the day that he could get away with tequila without hating himself.

_ Fuck. _

The Wobani Institute affair had been an absolute fucking disaster from end to end. The Wobani Institute had been an Imperial Enterprises weapons development thinktank, and someone—Cassian’s still not sure who—had been selling design secrets to Iran. The Met—not Interpol, but the fucking Met, which had been a mistake in and of itself—had taken a whistleblower into protective custody, and a contract killer had swaggered right past Met officers and killed the poor woman before hanging himself in his cell to keep the client who’d ordered the hit a secret. All the officers involved had had their involvement covered up, aside from one, who’d driven out to a family home in Wales, put a shotgun in his mouth, and blown the back of his head out all over the barn wall. The widow had come to Cassian (they’d known each other, him and Melshi, though Cassian would never have categorized it as anything more than a few jabs at each other’s professions over drinks; apparently it had had enough of an effect on Melshi that Rena had actually known Cassian’s name) and asked him to look into it, and when Cassian had gone to Draven, the detective inspector had refused to acknowledge any of it. So Cassian had gone to the newspapers instead. Anonymously, but the whole Met had known who had to have done it, and they’d cut him out as cleanly as a tumor. A year on, and the Met had only just started to recover a little of its creditability. Cassian’s business, on the other hand, had been flushed down a public toilet, along with the rest of his shitty decisions.

He grimaces. He should call the bank, make sure the transfer from Leia Organa has gone through so he can start paying off the backlog of rent he owes on the Denmark Place office. On second thought, he should have the temp— _ Jyn, _ he tells himself,  _ her name is Jyn Erso _ —do it; give her something to actually do, considering he’d called Temporary Solutions while more than a bit tipsy and hadn’t even remembered hiring the poor girl in the first place.

_ You’re getting bad at this if a temp secretary can make you uncomfortable, _ says a voice in his head. He’s not sure if it’s his own, or Tivik’s.  _ Doesn’t matter how freakish her eyes are. _

He leans back in his booth again, and turns the pint glass with the tips of his fingers on the handle. A small woman, built well, fierce-eyed and aggressive. She’d faced him at all times, never let him have her back when they were alone. He’s not sure if that had been a conscious choice, or old habit. When he reviews the morning in his mind, he can pick out other little details: flecking scabs on her knuckles he hadn’t fully processed, a twisting scar on her leg that he’d noticed but set aside for later consideration. It’d been from a blade, he thinks. Even with her carefully chosen, carefully nondescript business skirt— _ I am a secretary, _ the clothing had read;  _ I do not have an opinion, I do not have a voice _ —the cardigan had been a personal choice. It’d been fraying at the cuffs of the sleeves, like she’s either had it too long, or it’s something she wears often. It’d also belonged to a man. It hadn’t been cut for a female silhouette. Boyfriend, maybe, or male family member, one that was much taller and much larger than she was. The cardigan had been at least ten years out of date with clothing design. Her heels had been the only expensive thing on her, aside from whatever necklace she’d kept tucked under the collar of her button-down.

_ Sensible shoes,  _ he thinks.  _ Worn to shreds. And tattered clothes. _

He should  _ not  _ be more interested in unraveling the background of the temp secretary than he was in the actual, paying case that had been dropped into his lap. No matter if it’s a fool’s errand to try and break into adoption records.  _ Why didn’t Leia Organa just…go to the government about it and thrown some money around?  _ He writes down:

 

_ _

and then taps his pen against his lower lip. He shouldn’t be more intrigued by the damn temp secretary who’s going to be gone in a week, especially when he couldn’t even afford to pay her before two hours ago.

Seven days, and he won’t have to worry about paying her. He weighs that, and then nods.

He stays in the pub for the rest of the day, Googling Ben Kenobi until his phone dies. before heaving himself out of the booth, buying a cheap camp bed, and making the long trudge back to the Denmark Place office. It’s past eight when he finally unlocks the door, leaves the lights off to keep the building supervisor from noticing him here, and the place is empty. Jyn’s washed out all three of the coffee cups, and left them to dry in the rack beside the sink. She’s gone through his duffel bag, too. Some of the shirts are just barely out of place, and the gun’s been touched, the safety’s been adjusted just slightly. Something sinks in the pit of his stomach when he sees it. He keeps his old military ID and the ammunition for the pistol in the lockable drawer in his desk, along with his passport and all the private paperwork he can’t bring himself to look at any longer. Of course, all of  _ that  _ is in Spanish, so there’s no way anybody but him would be able to read it anyway—out of all the languages he comes across in this city, Spanish isn’t one that pops up frequently—but it’s still a matter of caution.

_ She’s a temp secretary, _ he thinks. She’s not—could not be—possibly related to any of the reasons he’d had to leave Mexico. She’s a  _ nosy  _ temp secretary, that’s for certain (why, though, when she seems determined to be unfriendly and unsmiling, is something else to consider) but she’s not here to look for any kind of information on  _ him _ in particular. She’s just—going through his things while he’s out of the office for her own reasons.

Cassian makes a mental note to call Temporary Solutions in the morning, and resolves to keep as much distance between him and the temp as is physically possible.

He also loads eight bullets into the cartridge of his pistol, and draws the shoulder holster out of its hiding place in his locked desk drawer, drawing it over his chest and down beneath his arm. When he holsters the gun, something knits tight in his throat. He’s lost weight, he thinks. Or muscle mass. It rests on him differently than it used to.

_ Seven days,  _ he tells himself again, as he sets up the camp bed. He can last for seven days. And then he’ll be alone again, and it won’t matter that a temp has gone through his things. 

He doesn’t sleep for a long time.

.

 

.

 

.

The next three days go about the same way as the first.

Andor seems allergic to her. Frankly, that’s fine by Jyn. She doesn’t  _ want  _ to see him—he makes her uncomfortable, somehow, with his deep sad eyes and the story that’s prickling at the edges of her skin, a (probably) homeless Mexican man working as a private investigator in London, of all places, looking for the birth parents of an ambassador’s adopted daughter,  _ this is not what I thought I was signing up for, bloody hell _ —so the fact that he only pops in to say hello, five minutes after she arrives, before vanishing for the rest of the day?  _ Absolutely fine. _ She’s unsupervised, and, aside from the landlord showing up every day at about three in the afternoon, unbothered. The landlord stops doing that on the second day, too—his payment must have gone through, so there’s nothing to nag at Andor  _ about _ .

_ Cassian’s fine,  _ he’d said. Not with her.

She falls into a rhythm. Morning spent Googling Bail Organa and his wife; afternoon responding to office emails (it mostly means she takes the firm email off of a great many mailing lists, which is mindless and just what she needs to relax), Googling Bail Organa and his wife some more out of pure boredom, and filing whatever paperwork Andor leaves on her desk during her lunch hour. He’s supremely talented at  _ just  _ missing her—coming in when she goes out for her lunch hour, leaving things for her to do, and then vanishing right before she comes back. It’s like she’s working for a ghost, but that’s at least easier than working for an out-and-out sleaze, so she’ll take it. At six o’clock precisely she turns off the computer on the front desk, leaves her completed paperwork on the desk in Andor’s office with post-its about messages if necessary, washes out the coffee pot and the mug she’s been using, and then locks the door behind her. Aside from one minute of interaction at 8:05 AM precisely, she sees nobody all day. It’s the easiest money she’s made in a long damn time, and she’ll almost be sorry to leave at the end of her week.

Well, almost.

The fourth day is when it changes. Jyn’s already in a bad mood when she walks in the door to the Denmark Place office; Bodhi’s finally come back, after three months touring around the northeast and the Shetland Islands, and they’d been up until three in the morning talking. Or, rather: they’d been up until three in the morning so Bodhi could ramble, in his nervous, roundabout way, and Jyn could listen. She never minds listening to Bodhi—she’d bean anybody who say she did, because Bodhi’s her  _ brother,  _ of course she doesn’t mind listening to him, especially when he’s gone for months at a time with no one to really talk to—but she’s tired, and she’s cranky, and the cat had darted between her legs as she’d been trying to get out the door this morning so she’d had to seize the damn moggie by his tail to drag him back inside and that had been one hell of a row. She has the bitemarks on her wrists from the beast to prove it. And then on top of  _ that _ , Bodhi keeps peeking at her out of the corner of his very wide eyes in a way that says he definitely hasn’t forgotten about the Christ Church question, so she’s probably going to have to deal with that when she gets home tonight, and won’t  _ that  _ be a tin of biscuits.

(The list of numbers and names still lurk, weasel-like and fanged, in the bottom of her purse. She likes to pretend they aren’t there. It makes things easier.)

Regardless of circumstances, when she walks into the office she’s operating off of maybe three hours total sleep, a headache, and a still-sore ankle. What she needs is coffee, quiet, and no backchat, precisely in that order.

What she gets is a very tall, very skinny man standing up from one of the waiting room chairs, peering down his long nose at her, and saying, “You aren’t Cassian.”

Jyn looks at him for a moment. He’s East Asian, this man. He’s also the tallest human being she’s ever seen in her life. He might actually hit his head on the ceiling, if he hadn’t been keeping it hunched it down between his shoulders. “No,” she says, shortly. “I’m not. Sorry, who’re you?”

“Kei Tu,” says the man, as if she should have any idea what that means. When she cocks an eyebrow, he scoffs. “Where’s Cassian?”

_ Up your arse, _ Jyn almost says. She puts her bag down onto the front desk, and then says, “Wait here a moment.”

Kei Tu, whoever he is, almost vibrates out of his own skin. Still, he sits back down in the chair, folds his hands neatly against his knees, and waits.

The office is empty. The camp bed’s been folded away again, hidden behind his coat rack the same way the duffel bag is skulking behind the desk. His phone is sitting on the desktop beside the keyboard. So are the keys to the office. Jyn wonders at that, for a moment, and then slides out of the back room. The very tall man stands up again, dipping his head like one of those toy birds that are supposed to rock until the end of time.  

“Well?”

“He’s not here, I’m afraid,” says Jyn. She tries to make herself smile, and it comes out more like bared teeth. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but he never has appointments. I saw no need to call ahead. I thought he would be here.” Tu looks very put-upon and consternated, his lips peeling back from his teeth in an equally fake smile. “You’ve never been here before.”

“I’m the secretary,” says Jyn, the same way someone else might say  _ you fucking moron _ . Bodhi calls it her Public Service Voice. “He’s usually in by now. If you’d like to sit and wait, I can try to contact him. I’m afraid he’s left his phone here, so he shouldn’t be gone much longer.”

“He might have been kidnapped,” says Tu. It’s not a joke. His eyes get very narrow and thoughtful. “Cassian has a remarkable tendency towards getting into trouble. It is very possible that he has been taken by some gang of miscreants.”

“I doubt it.”

“ _ You  _ do not know him,” says Tu. “If you did, you would agree with me. As it is, you seem very inhospitable for a secretary.”

“Yes, well.” Jyn bares her teeth again. “Like I said, he’s not in at the moment, so—”

“Cassian has no need for a secretary,” says Tu. “He would have told me if he did. I was under the impression his debt was too great to be able to even afford rent here.”

This is not a good morning for her. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“I am Cassian’s friend,” says Tu, as if this is something to be proud of. He even puts his shoulders back, a little. “Besides, you’re not a very good secretary. You’re being very rude.” 

“ _ I’m  _ being rude,” says Jyn.

“Oh,” says Andor at the door. He’s frozen on the threshold, his eyes widening, lashes flaring a bit like a startled meerkat. There’s a paper bag dangling from his free hand. “Kei.”

“ _ There  _ you are,” says Kei. “You did not tell me that the birth certificate you were asking me to check into would lead me down a hypothetical rabbit hole of identity theft.”

Jyn, in spite of herself, perks up her ears.

Something flickers, just a little, in Andor’s face. He puts his shoulders back. “I thought you were going to text me when you had something.”

“I deemed it advisable, considering the circumstances, not to leave a paper trail,” says Kei Tu. “Especially considering I have only twenty-three minutes before my weekly meeting at the Met. They wish to ensure I have not been doing anything illegal again,” he adds, to Jyn—Jyn blinks—but Kei Tu turns back to Cassian before she can respond. “Clearly I cannot  _ tell  _ them that with any level of honesty. I will still lie for you, but I expect  _ truth  _ in return for that courtesy.”

Andor says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kei.”

“You did not tell me you were hiring a secretary,” says Kei Tu.

“He forgot he hired me,” says Jyn, just to see Andor wince.

“Kei.” Andor shuts his eyes, opens them again. She thinks he might be trying not to sigh. “This is Jyn. She’ll be here for a few more days. Jyn, this is Kei. He’s a technological consultant I use sometimes.”

Kei waves a hand vaguely in her direction. “You are quite sure she is not a plant from Imperial Enterprises?”

“Absolutely,” says Andor, but Jyn goes still with her hands on the mouse.  _ Imperial Enterprises?  _ What the actual bloody fuck.

“Fine,” says Kei. “How much longer is she going to be here?”

“I’m  _ right here _ ,” says Jyn, and drops down into her desk chair.  _ You insufferable twat. _

Andor winces again. “Kei, do you want to talk about this somewhere else?”

“No,” says Kei. “I do not have time. I will need to leave in three minutes in order to make my meeting. The birth certificate you gave me is real enough, but the name on it is a fake. Jane Martha Barrie—”

“—is a fake name.”

“I do not have the time for you to interrupt me,” says Kei Tu, with such a peevish look that Jyn has to bite her tongue. “Jane Martha Barrie was born in 1959 and lived for five days before being buried in a Whitehall cemetery. I have confirmed this by visiting the cemetery itself and locating the grave. There is no possible way she could have given birth to a daughter before her death, let alone in 1998.”

Andor, sod him, just looks mildly intrigued. “So it’s a constructed identity, then. I thought she just made the name up, whoever she was.”

“No,” says Kei Tu. He looks at his watch again. “Someone constructed a false identity for this woman to give birth, and never used it again. I was unable to look into it further, as I ran into a dead end. Obviously this was done twenty years ago, but I have found no other records, national or international, of Jane Martha Barrie living, dying, existing, using utilities, creating bank accounts, or any other necessary action to live in the modern technological landscape at any point over the last two decades.” This, clearly, from the look on his face, was the only sort of landscape worth living in. “I am going to keep looking, but I believe this was a professional at work. I do not know the names of any actor twenty years ago who could have constructed a false identity such as this one, and I am not particularly interested in looking into it, nor do I have time. That you’ll have to do yourself.”  

Andor drifts. It’s the only word she can come up with for the odd motion of his eyes in that moment, like he’s fixating on something nobody else can see. Finally, he focuses again on Kei Tu. “Right. Thanks.”

“I am not finished,” says Kei Tu. “The name of the informant on the certificate, Minnau. There were seventeen different individuals with that last name in London at the time of Leia Organa’s birth. None of them were victims of identity theft that I can tell from their internet histories, so I have tentatively posited that the person present for the signing of the certificate is on that list. I have printed out their addresses and left them on the secretary’s desk.”

“I have a  _ name _ ,” says Jyn, and Andor winces again.

“Right,” says Andor. “Thank you, Kei.”

“You are welcome,” says Kei Tu. “I would appreciate advance warning in future if you anticipate involving me in further criminal acts of this nature.”

“I will.”

“You never do,” says Kei Tu, in a way that makes him sound more pleased about it than anything. “I would also appreciate you informing me if  _ she  _ is going to be here the next time you ask me to do something. I would prefer not to encounter her again.”

“Sod you too,” says Jyn, unable to help herself.

“I will text you if I uncover more information,” says Kei Tu, and then he goes. He doesn’t say goodbye, and he slams the door behind him, hard enough to make the laid-in glass shake in its sockets. Andor looks windswept, but pleased. Jyn wants to break something. Instead, she crumples a post-it in her hands, and chucks the thing hard into the bin.

“Sorry,” says Andor. “He’s—he never learned a filter.”

“Oh,” says Jyn. “One of  _ those _ .”

There it is again. That odd twitch at the corner of his mouth. She can’t work out if it’s him trying to stifle a smile, or him trying to hold his temper. “One of what?”

“One of those absolute  _ bloody  _ geniuses that doesn’t see the point in being polite,” says Jyn, and pulls up another ten-year-old news article on Bail Organa. No point in trying to pretend she’s not been jabbed in the arse, especially considering he’s a  _ private fucking investigator  _ and has probably already picked out the rings under her eyes. (She’d run out of foundation and cover-up, and hadn’t seen the point in trundling out to the pharmacy to get more before work. After all, she hadn’t expected Andor to be here for more than a damn  _ minute _ .)

Andor weighs that for a second or two, and rubs his thumb over his lower lip. “No,” he says, finally. “Kei is brilliant, but—no.”

“What, then?”

“If you ask him,” he says, “he’ll tell you, but it’s his business. I’ll leave it to him. Where’s that list he mentioned?”

There’s only one thing on the desk that she doesn’t recognize: an envelope, meant for A4 sized paper, white and sealed with tape. There’s no writing on it. Jyn weighs the thing in one hand—it’s almost as thick as her thumb, from how much paper’s been stuffed inside—and then offers it across the desk. Andor takes the thing, tucks it into his jacket, and then looks down at the paper bag in his free hand, like its existence has surprised him somehow. He holds it out to her.

Jyn blinks.

“As an apology for nearly killing you the first day,” he says. “And a thank you. I’ve appreciated you—keeping an eye on this place. Though there’s not much to watch.”

Jyn watches him, then. He doesn’t flinch, or waver. He meets her gaze, and waits until she lifts one hand and takes the bag, peering into it. There’s two coffees in the bottom, one marked with a  _ C  _ on the lid—that she draws out and hands back to him, pretending not to notice the touch of his thumb against her forefinger—and a chocolate chip muffin wrapped in wax paper. The coffee’s still hot enough to sting at her chilly fingertips, and it…actually smells good. It’s not the crap from the café downstairs, at least. “Right,” she says. She feels duckfooted and wrong, somehow, and she can’t work out why. “Cheers.”

Andor nods.

“Nothing yet for Ms. Organa, then,” says Jyn. The silence feels empty and awkward, for once. “About her parents, I mean.”  

“No.” Andor takes the other coffee for himself, and chucks the tray into the bin. “I can’t exactly get into adoption records, so I’m left asking around at the hospital and digging up old newspaper articles about Organa’s visits to Eastern Europe in 1998. Nothing’s panned out.”

“Right,” says Jyn. “So you think she was part of the underground adoption racket thing that goes on sometimes?”

“Maybe. The idea that someone constructed a false identity for the mother kind of belies that. Usually that’s too much trouble for human trafficking, though.” He considers. “Why do you ask?”

“Your—friend—was very fierce about it, is all.” She hesitates. “The fake identity thing, does that happen often with this kind of adoption?”

“I don’t know,” says Andor. “I don’t often look into illicit adoptions.”

“Cheating spouses more your thing, then?”

His nose does not wrinkle, but he says, with a certain amount of distaste: “When I don’t have anything else that pays.”

“Right.”

He sips his coffee, and says, “Why do you think Leia Organa’s mother gave birth under a false name?”

Her hackles raise. She can’t help it. Something pricks at the back of her throat.  _ What do you think, Liana?  _ She waits, until she’s sure that her voice won’t crack, before she says, “Are you asking me that because I’m a woman?”

“I’m asking because you found more information on Bail Organa in five minutes than most people would in twenty,” says Andor. “And because I’m curious.”

Jyn presses her foot against the underside of the desk. She only remembers her sore ankle  _ after  _ pain’s lanced up through her calf and bitten her bone-deep. “New identity was a professional job,” she says, finally. “From the sound of it. That probably costs more than the average junkie could afford.”

“What makes you say junkie?”

Jyn shrugs. “Dunno. Why not a junkie? Who gives up their daughter to an American ambassador, anyway?”

“There’s been a lot of money coming in over the years.” Andor’s watching her, with those big dark sad eyes of his. It’s making her itch. “You think a junkie would be able to afford seventy-five thousand pounds a year for her daughter?”

“Maybe. Not all junkies live on the street. Lots of people doing lines in penthouses in bloody Mayfair, they just don’t suffer the same way.”

The flicker in his face appears, and disappears. She can’t chase it any further. “True.”

“She’d have needed identification under that name to get into the hospital,” says Jyn. “And if it was backed up in the system, someone had to hack in to do that, same way your  _ friend _ did. Speaks to money, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Right,” says Andor, slowly.

Jyn goes back to clicking pointedly at the mouse.  _ Go away, _ she thinks.  _ Take your sad eyes and your curiosity out of here, damn you. _

“Why use a fake name for the mother and a real one for the informant?” asks Andor.

She sighs, and glares at him. “I don’t know. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

“I’m interested.”

“Maybe the informant was supposed to be someone else and there was an emergency,” says Jyn. “Maybe they forgot to give the fake ID to the people at the hospital or something. Maybe the baby came early and there was nothing they could do. Maybe Minnau was just some—random person that used as informant because the mother didn’t have anyone else to do it for her.” Her mouth puckers, almost in spite of herself. “Still, the mother usually acts as the informant in the UK, so—why have an informant at all?”

Andor nods, slowly. He looks out the window for a while. Jyn eyes him through her hair—she needs to get it trimmed, now that she thinks about it, it’s too long—and then goes back to scrolling through old political news sites.

It’s a good five minutes before Andor speaks again.

“I hate to ask you this,” he says, slowly. “But—I might—need a favor.”

Jyn freezes. She looks at him, and waits.

“Not that kind of favor,” says Andor, hastily. She thinks the tips of his ears might be going pink. “No, I—I need you to make some calls. Or, rather, I need you to make some calls for me. Discreet calls. I’d do it myself, but my accent is—memorable. I’d rather these calls not be memorable if it can be helped.”

She blinks, very slowly, and then sits up. This is  _ not  _ the sort of thing you get asked to do at an escort service. “Calls to who?”

He draws the envelope Kei left out of his jacket pocket again, and waves it at her. “Once I narrow some of the names down, at least. Just routine enquiries.”

“You want me to ask if they’ve ever been an informant on a birth certificate?”

“No, I’ll—I’ll come up with something.” He thumbs the edge of the envelope. “If you’d rather not, I understand. It would just—make things slightly easier.”

She weighs it, pros and cons.  _ Nothing you haven’t done before.  _ Still—she thinks, for longer than she wants to admit, before she finally says, “I could say that I’m calling from their insurance company about a claim or something.”

Relief bursts into his face, bright as the sun through clouds. “That works.”

“Then yeah,” she says. “Yeah, sure. If you like.”

“Thanks,” says Andor. He pauses, thinks. Then he offers the envelope back to her. “If—if you don’t mind doing it now, that’d be a help. I need to make some calls myself, in the other room, but—just anything you can find out about where they are currently, if they’re still in London. Anything that can tell me where they’ll be in the next few days so I can go talk to them.”

“You want me to tell them who you are?”

“I’d rather them be taken by surprise,” he says. “Makes it easier to learn things if they don’t know I’m coming.”

Jyn nods.

“This isn’t legal,” he says, still looking at her. “I’d understand if you’d rather not do it.”

“No, it’s fine.” It slips out of her before she can stop it, and leaves a strange, oversweet taste on her tongue, like a biscuit with too much sugar to let her swallow it. “I don’t mind. No problem.” 

The corner of his mouth lifts, though it’s nothing close to what she might call a smile. He vanishes into his office. Jyn looks back at her computer, and swears under her breath.

_ Right then. _

Bail Organa’s wife stares at her out of the photograph on her computer screen. It’s not in the least bit helpful.

.

 

.

 

.

He watches.

It’s a test, and he won’t lie about it if asked. He has the gut instinct that Jyn Erso might know, somewhere, that she’s being put on the spot for a reason—that he’s giving her this task for some reason  _ other  _ than just delegation, especially considering they’ve had maybe ten total minutes of interaction prior to now—but whether she’s realized he knows she’s gone through his things or no, that he can’t be sure of. Still, he leaves his office door open intentionally when he limps through into the back, and he coincidentally goes out to put the kettle on for hot water when she picks up the phone to make the first call.

Kei had supplied names, from the look of the list. Current addresses and phone numbers. It still takes her an hour to get to the calls, and when he circles around to get a look at the screen of her computer, he realizes it’s because she’s looked them all up online. Facebook, Twitter, employment pages at their respective companies. She has their work information, their homepages, their profile pictures, and their dates of birth all up in different tabs, and she’s flicking back and forth between them as she introduces herself, in a very thick Yorkshire accent, as Violet from the NHS, “sorry, but I’m just checkin’ that our records are up-to-date ‘nall, can you just confirm one or two details for me, luv?” Cassiain leans his hips against the windowsill, and listens without bothering to conceal his curiosity as she marks off the third name, and then the fourth. She’s uncomfortable, he thinks. The longer he stands out here, the higher up her shoulders hitch. So once the coffee’s properly steeped, he salutes her with his mug, and retreats back to his office, shutting the door behind him.

When he types  _ Jyn Erso  _ into the search engine on his computer, he gets…nothing. If she’s on Facebook, it’s not under her given name. He’s confirmed, at least, that she does, indeed, work for Temporary Solutions, and when he’d described her as “small and a little angry” the woman on the other end of the line had snorted so loud that Cassian had wondered if the call had been disconnected. “Sounds about right,” the woman had said, and snapped her gum. “She lose you a client or something?”

“No.”

“That’s good, then,” she’d said, and still been laughing when he’d hung up.  

She’s not on Facebook; she’s not on Twitter. The only email he has in his system for her is the one from Temporary Solutions. She clearly has a phone, but he can’t exactly get the number from her without making her think he’s trying to pick her up, and that’s the last thing he wants or needs at the moment.

_ So she’s just a private person, _ his civilian brain says.

_ Sure, _ says his FES brain.

_ You’re being paranoid, _ says his civilian brain.

_ Keeps me alive, _ says his FES brain.

Cassian rubs at his leg, and keeps digging.

When he just types in the name  _ Erso _ —it’s unique, that’s for certain—he has to scroll through the google results for a good twenty minutes before he finally finds a fifteen year old article in a science magazine about a Danish scientist named Galen Erso. When he clicks on the links to  _ that, _ he mostly gets dead ends—dead hyperlinks, mostly—but one or two lead back to a small company called  _ Stardust _ , which seems to have assimilated into the Imperial Enterprises conglomerate in about 2002. Jyn Erso can’t be more than twenty-five, so she would have been a child back then, but it’s  _ possible  _ that she’s related to the Galen Erso somehow _. _ The company had been settled in Birmingham. Jyn Erso, to his only semi-trained ear, has a Birmingham accent. That, on top of the look on her face when Kei had mentioned Imperial Enterprises—not anything obvious, not any kind of anger or shock or surprise, just a kind of tightening around the mouth and pinch around the eyes that ninety percent of people wouldn’t have noticed happening at all—that’s a link, he thinks. A weak link, maybe, weaker than he’d be willing to admit to aloud. Still. It’s a link.

_ Your job, _ he tells himself again,  _ is to find Leia Organa’s birth parents. Not figuring out your temp secretary. _

He closes out of Google.

It’s about another forty minutes before there’s a soft knock at his door—Cassian checks, even though he knows, that his camp bed is safely stowed behind the coat rack and covered with a sweater before he says “Yeah”—and Jyn pokes her head in. Her tight bun’s unfurled a little, and her limp has faded.

“Hey,” she says. The mask of incivility’s faded a bit, too. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah, of course.” There’s a take-out box on the end of his desk. Cassian tosses it into the bin. “What’d you find?”

“Mm, well—” She waves the envelope at him, and then settles in the chair opposite, the one Leia Organa had used. “Three of these people are dead, first of all. One of them for thirty years, so—so you don’t have to worry about him. But most of them are all in London, still, or the greater London area at least. One’s in Cambridge.” Her voice fades, changes, shifts to plummy Oxbridge. “Just outside the city. Works as a don. Has leukemia. Didn’t even ask why I needed to update her address.”

“Probably not her,” says Cassian, and Jyn shrugs.

“Can’t know that until you talk to her, but I’d guess no.” She hesitates, and curls her fingers tighter around the papers, the envelope. When she leans forward, nudges the papers onto his desk, they’ve been scribbled on. More names, more information. Current addresses and phone numbers. Her handwriting is cramped and spikey, and she writes her  _ F _ s the same way she writes her  _ J _ s, lowercase at least. “There’s that.”

“Right.” Cassian folds his hands on the desk. “I really appreciate this.”

“No problem.” She stands, smooths out her slacks. It’s more of the same kind of  _ look not here  _ formal businesswear, cheap but not obviously so. There’s a scrape on her knuckles that looks like it came from a bad punch. The cardigan, though, is back, long and dark green and much too large for her, She shrugs closer into it, folding her arms across her chest. “Seriously. Broke up the monotony.”

Cassian makes himself smile a little. “Right. I’m sure it’s been boring for you.”

“You keep very neat records,” says Jyn. She sounds more irritated about it than complimentary. “Means I don’t have much to do.”

“I appreciate you being here,” he lies. Or—well. It’s not a lie, exactly. It’s just not the truth, either. 

She opens her mouth, and shuts it again.

“What?”

“You don’t have to pretend to be nice to me,” she says, after a moment. “I mean, I’m not—going to be here in a few days. And I don’t—” She stops, struggles with the words for a moment, and folds her arms tighter across her chest. “Anyway. You don’t have to be nice to me. I’m not going to sue about you nearly killing me, or anything.”

“I didn’t think you were,” says Cassian, in a voice he barely keeps even. He’s not even sure why. Maybe because he hasn’t been called out for lying in years. He’s forgotten what it feels like, to get caught. Jyn’s cat-green eyes jump from his face to the wall and back again.

“Right,” she says. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll just—”

She jabs one small hand towards the door.

“Yeah,” says Cassian. “Like I said. Thanks for this.”

“Yeah, whatever,” says Jyn, and starts back out the door. She’s halfway to closing it before she stops, and turns. “I think—I think you might want to focus on Number Nine. First, I mean.”

“Yeah?” He waits. “Why?”

“I d’no.” She squeezes the doorknob, and then says, “She used to work in politics. I—I found a photo of her in the American Embassy. Long time ago, but still.”

“Did she work there when Organa was—”

“Yeah.” Jyn looks at the wall again. Then she lets go of the door, makes a vague gesture towards his computer. “Can I?”

“Yeah,” says Cassian. He pushes his rolling chair back, doesn’t get up. His notebook is lying open on the desk beside the keyboard, but the page he’s left it on is all mathematical equations, nothing that anybody could read without picking his brain to do it. No danger there. “Yeah, sure.”

She types the hyperlink in from memory, and the sound of her short nails on the keyboard is like rattling bullet casings. She’s not comfortable, he thinks, standing near him. He’s starting to think that anybody in her personal space—and her personal space seems to extend out around her in a ball of five feet around, easily punctured—makes her want to run. “Here,” she says, as the article loads, and then she points to a nondescript face in the back of a row of suited figures, Bail and Breha Organa in front with no child, their aides and assistants spread out behind the, a human cape of office and respectability. “Right—yeah, that’s her. With the pink blouse, you see? She was an assistant or a translator or something. She's not listed in the caption, but that's definitely her.”

Cassian sees, He has to squint, and kind of lean around her arm to get a better look at the photo—Jyn Erso jumps, when he does that, drops her hand and steps away like she’s going to be hit with a cattle prod—but he sees it. He steals the mouse from her, and scrolls up and down. “How did you find this?”

Jyn wavers. “I’ve—I was googling, yesterday, and I remembered her face. Took me a bit to track it back down, but it popped up eventually.” She bites the inside of her lower lip, not quite looking at him anymore, and adds, “I just remember faces.”

“You said she’s number nine on the list?”

“Yeah. Her name’s Teckla Minnau.” Jyn untucks her arm from the knot she’s made around herself,  and then shrugs. “I mean, she was only there for a few months after this photo was taken, I couldn’t—I couldn’t find her in any articles after this, but. Pretty sure that’s her. According to the bio on the cached version of the site, she went to school at Oxford and before that Franklin University in Switzerland, it’s this—American university outside Lugano. Has multiple degrees in international relations. From Indonesia, originally.” She folds her arm back in, and then says, “Just…from Google.”

Cassian looks at her for a moment, and then says, “All of that was on the cached website.”

She scowls. “Most of it.”

And that’s all the answer he’s going to get from her. “Right.” He looks down at the list of names, and then, slowly, gets up. His leg is bothering him today, more than it usually does—it’s going to rain, and that usually makes the damn thing ache—and it takes him a second longer than usual. Jyn watches him, and says nothing. “Her address is up to date?”

“Yeah.” Jyn’s eyes drop to the envelope, the papers. “She’s still at work, I think. Coruscant Design. It’s in West Brompton, the address is—”

He grabs his coat off the rack, looks back at her, and then says, “You want to go talk to her?”

_ That  _ startles her. Jyn Erso’s eerie green eyes get wide; her hands fall away from her ribs, baring her stomach; her lips part. She wets them down, and then says, “What?”

“You want to go talk to her?” Cassian says again. “Teckla Minnau.”

Her eyes narrow. “I told you, don’t be nice to me.”

“I’m not,” Cassian says, and he isn’t. But he can’t just say  _ I want to see if you’re as good in the field as I think you might be  _ without getting her twitchy and uncooperative. “But a man hanging around a building in West Brompton for no reason is suspicious.”

Her eyes get even narrower. She says, “And a couple hanging around isn’t.”

Cassian shrugs, and then says, “I’ll buy you more coffee. And it’s the only time I’ll ask. Probably.”

“Probably,” says Jyn, and when he looks up at her, he could swear some part of her is laughing. It vanishes as soon as it appears, fading back into her unfriendly scowl, the thick lines carved deep into her forehead, around her mouth. Stress lines. Weariness. She looks down at her bruised and beat-up hands, smooths awkwardly at her cardigan. Her eyes dart to the drab olive messenger bag she’d left beneath the desk.

“Yeah,” she says, after a bit. “Could do with a walk.”

Cassian hides a smile of his own behind the collar of his coat.

.

 

.

 

.

The building that houses Coruscant Design is one of many similar buildings in West Brompton, all trim and freshly painted and with security checks at the door. “That’s the one,” Jyn says, once they’ve found a bench and settled into it, Jyn curling around her third cup of coffee of the day—she’d finished the half-empty mug Bodhi had left on the dining table, just because, before leaving the house. Andor at least is not cheap with bribery coffee. It’s probably the only reason she’s sitting here, outside of her own curiosity.

Andor glances at her. “Which?”

“The one with the red door.”

“Google Maps?”

She waggles her smartphone at him, and goes back to blowing on her coffee. Andor’s stretched both legs out in front of him, wincing a little, and thankfully keeps his arms to himself. She’s not sure she wouldn’t have broken his elbow if he’d tried to pull the  _ settle the arm along the back of the bench  _ trick that men try sometimes. It doesn’t help that she already feels like a smear on the West Brompton sidewalk. The coats on the people walking by cost more than her entire monthly rent, and the woman stepping over Andor’s legs is wearing six-inch heels and carrying a pug in her purse. She gives him a filthy look as she stalks off, spitting Czech into her mobile, but Andor doesn’t seem to notice. He watches the building for a bit, and then turns his head to look down the street, tracking passing cars.

“Is this what you do all day?” she says, after a while. “Watch people’s doors?”

“Mostly.” Andor doesn’t look around.  _ Bad cover _ , she thinks,  _ if we’re both just staring _ . “There’s a lot of waiting involved. Usually I have a camera, but this isn’t one of those jobs.”

“Right.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Nobody will believe we’re here for no reason if we’re not talking,” she says, and stares at the lid of her coffee cup. “I don’t think.”

“True.” He looks tired, she thinks. There are rings under his eyes and deep lines in his face, like he’s not used to making any expression other than bitten-off pain. Andor turns to look at her, and then shuffles around on the bench, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He looks at his boots for a while, and then turns to watch her out of the corner of his eye. Jyn tightens the strap of her messenger bag across her chest, and resettles it against her thigh. “Have you ever done this before?”

“This?”

He looks at the red door opposite. The building vomits out a trio of white women with very blonde hair and very long legs, who go chortling off for a lunch at Pret Manger. Well, probably much more expensive than Pret Manger, but that’s always the first place that pops into Jyn’s head when she thinks of overpriced, organic tuna sandwiches. She says, “No.”

It’s not quite true. She’s acted as a lookout before. Mostly for Saw, or Magva. She’d sit on park benches like this one and make phone calls when certain people left certain buildings. Then she’d been a teenager, and it’d been easier for her to get away with it. It just hadn’t been in so pricey a neighborhood as West Brompton.

He wants to know something specific, she thinks. What, she’s not sure of. It might just be professional paranoia. Still, she’s not an idiot, and he’s only pretending to be curious to get some kind of nugget of information out of her.

“It’s boring,” says Andor eventually. “I think I read all through Charles Dickens on waits like these.”

Jyn sips at her coffee, and says, “I don’t like Dickens much.”

“Because he’s long-winded?”

“Because he’s anti-Semitic.”

Andor blinks at her, and then says, “I see.”

_ This is idiotic, _ her logical brain snaps at her.  _ You know better. _ Being out here, in the open, with an investigator of all bloody people—it’s moronic, and more than that it’s close to suicidal if somebody recognizes her. Andor’s given her no reason to do this favor for him. He’s given her every reason  _ not  _ to help him. Still. She turns the cup of coffee in her hands, and then says, “Why Dickens?”

“Why not Dickens?”

“Because he’s long-winded and anti-Semitic.”

“True,” says Andor. “But you can always find Dickens in cheap bookstores.”

Which is also true, but not an answer. “Why did Kei Tu think I was a plant from Imperial Enterprises?”

Andor doesn’t even blink. He says, “Because I had an investigation into a case relating to IE a year ago, and Kei is paranoid.”

“What case?”

“Whistleblower was killed. Police messed up, lost the suspect.” He shrugs. “I looked into it and managed to bother IE. And the police, incidentally.”

_ Which is why you’re broke, _ she thinks,  _ and the only client you have is a rich American girl who came out of nowhere at just the right time. Somehow. _

“I heard about that. There were stories everywhere.”

“Yeah,” says Andor. “It didn’t end well.”

“You think IE would spy on you?”

“Kei thinks they might be.”

“So he thinks I’m a spy from Imperial Enterprises,” she says.

“Probably.”

It’s a stupid question to ask. Still, there’s a pressure in her chest, bubbling, steam rising up her throat.  _ Don’t,  _ she tells her traitor mouth.  _ Don’t ask it. _

“Do you think I am?” she says.

Andor turns, and looks at her, carefully. “I don’t know that you’re  _ not _ ,” he says. “But I don’t think you are. either.”

“Why?”

“Spies usually try to pick locked desk drawers or hack into private computers instead of just going through other people’s duffel bags”

Jyn looks at him for a while.  _ Well, there’s that then.  _ No point in denying it, if he noticed.

“You have a gun,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Did you bring it with you legally?”

“Somewhat,” says Andor.

“Do you have a license for it?”

“It's a handgun," he says. "What do you think?”

“No,” says Jyn.

The corner of his mouth turns inward. He says nothing.

“You’ll probably be deported if they catch you with that, you know,” she says, and turns to stare at the red door again.

“You’re not going to report me?”

“Why should I care if you have a gun or not so long as you don’t shoot me with it?”

“True.” He resettles his hands. “Why do you hate Imperial Enterprises?”

“I don’t,” says Jyn.

“You don’t like them.”

“I don’t care about them,” she says.  _ I can’t afford to. _

“Why ask, then?”

“Curiosity.” And now she’s regretting it. “Is that her?”

Andor looks at the red door, just for a moment, to stare at the dark-haired woman emerging. He says, “No.”

_ Damn. _ “So why ask me to help if you don’t think I’m a spy?”

He shrugs, and says, “Curiosity”

There’s no way she can reply to that. Not really.

“That’s her, though,” Andor adds, and Jyn grips the strap of her messenger bag tight with one hand. When she turns her head, he reaches out, catches her wrist. “Don’t jump.”

_ Too late for that. _ She keeps her shoulders tight, and looks him in the eye again. Jyn forces a smile. “Which way is she going?”

“Up the street.” His eyes track over her shoulder, and then flick to her. Andor nods once, tight, and lets go. “Come on. She’s on her phone, she’s not moving very fast.”

“Right.” She stands, waits for him to lever himself to his feet and then slides her arm through his. Andor goes stiff as a board, though she’d not have noticed if she hadn’t been leaning right up against his side. To the rest of the street, the small smile on his face might actually have looked genuine. His hand’s curled up into a fist in the pocket of his worn overcoat. “You’re the one who wanted to look nonchalant,” she says, when he shifts his elbow in hers, and then he relaxes, all at once. He draws his hand out of his coat, finds hers and threads their fingers together. His palm is dry and cool against her’s.

“Right,” he says, and faces forward, enduring like a good little soldier. Jyn looks up the street, at the bright red jacket that must belong to Teckla Minnau. “You’re okay?”

“Stop asking me stupid questions,” Jyn says, through her teeth, and starts to walk.

Whoever she is, the woman in the red coat has no reason to suspect she’s being followed. She traipses, eyes fixed on her phone except in short bursts to check she’s not going to walk right into a telephone pole, and Jyn shifts until her shoulder jostles Andor’s arm with every limping step, holds his hand and forces herself to disassociate from the moment. She doesn’t like people touching her, and never has—there’s something very sacred, she thinks, about having a choice in who comes near your body, no matter what the context—but Andor’s respectful about it, at least. He doesn’t do anything weird, like pet her fingers or anything. He just holds her hand, clinically, almost, for all that the look on his face says  _ soft affection _ and the sway to his step says  _ well-known date.  _ Whatever he’d been in the military had trained him well.  _ That, or he’s just a fucking good actor, and Hollywood’s missing out. _ When the crossing light turns colors, they come to a slow stop just behind the woman in the red coat, and Andor bends to her ear. “That’s her?”

Jyn can’t make out the face, not exactly. She’d have to pull Andor forward, stand right beside the woman in the red coat and turn to get a look at her silhouette. It  _ looks  _ like the woman in the photo. Twenty years older, obviously, with a bit more grey in her hair, more lines around her mouth. She can’t be positive without a direct look. Still, she lifts her chin, and says, “Pretty sure.”

The crosswalk turns white. The woman in the red coat looks up, double-checks for cars, and starts across the street. Andor waits two beats before stepping forward too, and Jyn steps with him, her eyes glued to the space between the woman’s shoulder-blades. It’s only the barest flicker of motion in the corner of her eye that catches her attention, and when she turns—

_ Well. _

“Andor,” she says, through her teeth.

“I see them,” says Andor, and he goes taut, in his arms and shoulders, in his stance. There are two men getting out of a car parked against the side of the road. One of them, Jyn thinks, is carrying a knife. She can see him moving around it, see it crimping the fabric of his sleeve. He’s not hiding it very well. “You should go.”

She doesn’t bother to give that a response. She squeezes Andor’s hand—punishment, not reassurance, hard enough to give him sore fingers—and then she speeds up. He limps, a little, but he keeps up, walking hard and fast. There’s no time for him to argue with her, not if they’ve been followed.

_ What the fucking hell is going on?  _

“Miss Minnau,” says Andor, in a soft, clear voice, and the woman in the red coat turns. They’re almost in the middle of the sidewalk. Jyn lets go of his hand, and rolls her head on her neck. Her ankle hurts, but not as bad. She won’t need it, she thinks. Not if these two are as full of themselves as she thinks they might be. She pulls her scarf up over her nose.  _ Surveillance cameras will still be able to make an ID, probably,  _ at least, if they can get a good shot of her face peeping out from beneath her beanie, but that doesn’t matter at the moment, it matters more that whoever hired these goons don’t get a good look at her, not right away, and if the police track her down— _ fuck. _ She can always go back to Oxford, she supposes. “Don’t react.”

Minnau blinks, and her full lips part. She’s pretty, Jyn thinks, but in the sort of way that orchids are pretty. Not quite real. Almost plastic. “Do I know you?” Her accent’s definitely not English. That, at least, is as expected.  _ Teckla Minnau who’d been born in Indonesia, gone to school in Switzerland and England, worked— _ “Sorry, I don’t—”

“You’re being followed,” says Jyn.

“What?”

“No time for questions,” says Andor. “If you could please—”

_ No time. No time.  _ The men are only a dozen yards out. They’re coming up on an alley. Jyn stops walking, plunges her hand into her messenger bag. The collapsible baton’s tucked into the interior pocket the way it always has been. She hasn’t needed it in years. She still goes nowhere without it. “Get her somewhere safe,” she says, and Andor’s eyes blow wide. His pupils flare, and contract. She’s shocked him, somehow. It might be the first time.

“Jyn—”

_ No point in fucking arguing, _ she thinks, and it must show on her face, because Andor shuts up, immediately. He nods, tight, lips pinching at the corners.

“Excuse me,” says Minnau. The two men are only a few yards away now. “But if this is some kind of joke—”    

She’d forgotten how much she loves this baton. Five inch handle, a foot long fully extended, and  _ heavy _ . Heavy and strong. Jyn snaps the thing open, spins it in her free hand, and rams it back into the gut of the nearest thug, hard enough to make him heave, stagger. The woman in the red coat screams. Andor doesn’t. Andor seizes Minnau’s arm, and pushes her into the alley, out of the way. The tail of his coat flicks around the corner, and then he’s gone. It’s all Jyn can see before the tunnel vision closes in.

They’re taller than her, these two men, real muscle types, the sort that the wrong kind of people hire for the wrong kind of business, rough and bulky and bald as eggs, one white, one flushed red trying to keep his guts from coming up through his mouth.  _ Stomach, chin, head,  _ and the first snaps around, crumples, hits the ground with a noise like a whipped dog.  _ Untrained. _ Or, at least, not trained like she is. Regular bodyguard. No martial arts. Just weight and brute force. Nothing difficult. Jyn slams the end of the baton onto the back of his head just in case, and pivots away, out of reach of the one with the knife. Somebody screams. A man, not Minnau, not Andor. A crowd. People. Witnesses.  _ Fuck. _ The second man has his knife drawn, glinting in the thin winter sunlight, and Jyn spins the baton in her hand before driving the heavy handle into the back of his wrist. He drops it, but he’s done it intentionally, lured her close, and when his fist catches her in the cheek she tastes blood on her tongue.  _ Bastard. _ He’s fisted his hand in the lapel of her coat. Jyn lashes out with her bad foot, and yells between her teeth when she catches him in the knee with her heel, hard, hard enough to crack the thing, to knock it out from under him and send him swearing and toppling sideways. He catches her scarf on the way down, and  _ fuck, sloppy,  _ her head snaps forward and stars burst in front of her eyes,  _ good way to get killed,  _ Saw says in her mind,  _ good way to get your neck broken, little fool, what are you thinking,  _ and Jyn lashes out blind, catches him in the face with the end of the baton and breaks the man’s nose. He howls, spitting blood, yanks her close, and it’s instinct to pivot on her bad foot, twist her ankle into pain and seize her opponent and  _ heave _ —

The man lands in the window of an expensive-looking shoe shop with an almighty crash. He shatters glass, heels, the stand. An alarm starts to blare. He doesn’t get up. It’s hard to tell through the ringing in her ears, but she thinks she might hear police sirens in the near distance. More people are screaming. Jyn yanks the scarf back up over her nose, hissing when it catches the cut on her cheek— _ blood; this one will be ruined; Bodhi will be disappointed; DNA, moron, DNA— _ and she folds the baton back up, shoving it into her coat, turning and pushing her way past a couple of people trying to crowd closer and film at the same time.  _ Fucking smartphones.  _ She could smash the lot. She doesn’t check the alley, or Minnau. She keeps her head low and hopes—prays, almost, if she remembered how to pray; she doesn’t—that the beanie and her scarf have been enough, that they’d walked fast enough and low enough and kept their heads turned away from cameras just long enough that she won’t get arrested again. 

There’s a spot of blood on her dad’s cardigan. She ignores it. There’s no point, she tells herself, in fussing over an old cardigan. Not when the man who wore it wouldn’t give a damn either.

She shoves her hands into her pockets, and makes for the nearest tube station.

.

 

.

 

.

“What the  _ hell  _ is going on?” says Teckla Minnau, not for the first time.

Cassian says, “I was hoping you could tell me that, Miss Minnau.”

“You’re the one that accosted me on the street and dragged me back here, Mr.—”

“Andor.”

“You’re not a policeman,” says Minnau. “You have no right to be treating me this way.” 

“I’m sorry, Miss Minnau,” he says. He is most definitely not sorry. He’s not sure what he is—anger, roiling beneath the surface, boxed into a corner and locked away until it’s useful; cold, clinical detachment, picking out every scrap of a flaw about this woman, every grey hair on her head, every fidget in her hands and every darting look—but he’s not sorry. Still, she believes it, because he’s long since learned how to sound genuinely sorry for someone without meaning a bit of it. She leans back in her chair, huffs. He smooths his voice out, leans forward, looks at her with eyes he widens, just a bit.  _ Earnestness. Pleading.  _ “I’m sorry again for the fuss. I can promise you, you’re safe here, from—whatever that was.”

“I don’t know  _ what  _ it was,” says Minnau. She scowls. “So far as  _ I  _ know you and your friend—whoever she is— _ you’re  _ who were attacked on the street, not me. I don’t have the slightest idea what anyone would want to attack me for. I’d rather speak to the police, if it’s all the same to you.”

“The police are on their way,” he lies. “I called them.” He’d rather call a case of botulism and ask it to take up residence than involve the Met at this point, especially Draven, who’ll come running at the first mention of his name, but enough people will have dialed 999 in West Brompton at this point that involving them will be inevitable. Once any of the uniforms get a good look at the surveillance footage, Draven will send a squad out to his office, and then he’s well and truly done in London. And he’ll probably be arrested to boot. He bites the inside of his cheek. Something twinges, hard, in his throat.  _ Where’s Jyn? _

_ Christ.  _ It yanks at him, the flash of memory, pulls him under.  _ A temp secretary fighting like that, and yet  _ not  _ a spy.  _ He’s sure of that now. She’d never have revealed that, if she’d been a spy for the cartels. She’d have knifed him in the neck long ago, if that had been her purpose. He’s given her enough deliberate openings today, and she’s not taken them. But the fighting—

_ Training, _ his instincts say.

_ From who?  _ adds his paranoia.

_ Does it matter?  _ his common sense snaps, and that’s the one he goes with. Cassian folds his hands, rests his lips to them for a moment. So long as she seems to be on his side, it doesn’t matter who trained her. The information’s not worth anything, at the moment. The future is a different story, but for now, Minnau is the priority. Minnau looks at him, and whatever she’s about to say dies in her throat. She bites her lip, and smooths her skirt down her legs again.

“Well,” she says. “So long as they’ve been made aware.”

Pause, he thinks. Pause and let her stew for a moment. Then, he clears his throat. “I’m a private investigator,” says Cassian. “Working on behalf of a woman named Leia Organa. You knew her father, I think, or at least met him, when you worked with the Embassies here in London.”

“Organa?” She wets her lips again. “I’m sorry, I don’t—recognize that name, I don’t think.”

“You were photographed with Bail Organa and his wife at a charity event roughly twenty years ago. Some kind of fundraiser or other.” He pauses, waits, catches the tic to her jaw. She’s clenching her teeth, wetting her lips, recrossing her legs. “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Bail Organa was murdered several months ago. His daughter’s grieving. She’s decided to search for her birth parents. She asked me to take a look at some things on her behalf.”

“Like me,” says Minnau, slowly. “But I—even if you’re right and I was photographed with Bail Organa, that was twenty years ago. I don’t see how I’d be able to help you now.”

Cassian unlocks the drawer at the base of his desk, draws out the Leia Organa file, the photocopy of the birth certificate. He passes it across to her. Minnau recognizes it—she  _ does _ , the flare to her eyelashes, the parting of the lips, the sudden lack of blood around her mouth, it’s all as obvious as a bloodstain—but she clears her throat and says, “What’s this, exactly?”

“A birth certificate.” He taps the ends of the paper, and she jerks it towards herself. “I’d think you’d recognize it. You’re the informant.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. She wipes her palms on her skirt again. “When are the police getting here?”

“I don’t know what the Met has to do with their time. It’s hard to say. Soon. Why do you think those men were after you?”

“After me?” Minnau blinks. “I thought they were after you.”

“No.” He taps his forefinger to the top of his desk. “Have you made anyone angry with your work lately? Anything that might have irritated somebody enough to send people after you?”

“I design websites for biofuel companies,” says Minnau. “I don’t see how I could manage anything like that.”

“Before that you worked as a translator for the English government,” he says, and her lips go whiter under the lipstick. She stares hard at the wall instead. “You were photographed with Leia Organa’s father twenty years ago. The implication there being you knew each other, even if it was back in 1998 and you haven’t spoken since.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Minnau. She leans back in her chair, and shuts the folder. “And I’ve met a great many ambassadors over the years. It’s what happens when you work as a translator for the government, Mr. Andor, you get called to a lot of Embassies in the middle of the night.”

“You went from translating to website design,” says Cassian. “Bit of a leap.”

“I didn’t like the hours.” She pushes the folder back onto the desk. “Is that why you and your hitwoman came after me on the street? To ask me about a man I met once— _ once _ —twenty years ago? Because if it is, I don’t really have anything to say to you. I barely even remember meeting him.”

She smooths her hands on her skirt again. Minnau won’t look him in the eye. Cassian threads his hands together, and props his elbows on the desk.

“But you do remember meeting him.”

“Like I said, it was only once. And I’ve met a lot of people, so I’m—I might be mixing him up with someone else. It’s not as if I was his secretary or anything.”

“Your name is on his daughter’s birth certificate.”

“London has a lot of people, Mr. Andor,” she says. “I’m sure  _ someone  _ else is named Minnau.”

“You have to know that’s one hell of a coincidence.”

“Yes, well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I haven’t had anything to do with embassies or politics in twenty years, and I don’t know what I can do for you, except give you answers you  _ clearly  _ don’t want. And there’s no reason in the world I can think of that would get two burly men to come after me in broad daylight, so whatever happened out in West Brompton, it had nothing to do with me.” She pulls out her smartphone. “I need to call the office, I need to tell them—tell them I’ll be wrapped up with the police all afternoon, if they even  _ get  _ here—” 

“They’re on their way,” he lies again, in a soothing, careful voice. “Miss Minnau, I’m sorry to be pushing like this, I really, truly am. I’m just—trying to work out what’s going on. I just want to be sure that you’re safe. That’s all, I swear to you.”

She wets her lips, and darts another look at him.

“I can make coffee,” he says. “If that would help you stop shaking.”

Minnau jumps. She looks at her trembling hands, lifts one to her lips. “Yes,” she says, after a moment. Desperate, almost. “Yes, that would—yes.”

His leg is throbbing, when he stands. The scars have pulled tight, and there’s something jamming into his leg, some part of the socket rubbing his skin the wrong way. He should have put in one of the gel pads that Kei keeps leaving for him, pointedly, on the top of his desk. He hates how they feel, but they would at least have cushioned the damn thing. He hadn’t expected to need to flee the scene of a damn crime. Cassian limps down the hall, puts the kettle on to boil and looks at the starkly empty chair at the front desk. Jyn doesn’t have his mobile number, and he doesn’t have hers. He’s regretting that, at the moment.    __

_ Get her somewhere safe, _ Jyn had snapped, and there’d been—something. In her face. He knows that look, even if the word tastes sour on his tongue.  _ Experience.  _ She’d had experience fighting off a would-be kidnapping, or attack, or whatever it was that had happened in the streets of West Brompton. She’d tucked the scarf up over her nose like it was second nature, and the baton—

He shakes coffee into the French press, braces his hands against the counter instead of his face, takes a breath. In the office, Minnau shifts around. The tap of her heel against the floor is the tick of too many seconds. A siren echoes up the lane in front of the building, but it’s an ambulance, not a police car. There’s still time.

_ What in God’s name is going on here?  _ Two men hired to—what, kill Minnau? Pick her up? Act as her guards? Try to keep him from speaking to her? Who’s watching Teckla Minnau? Why would they need to? Were they even following Minnau? What if they’d been following him?  _ Or Jyn,  _ his common sense reminds him.  _ They might have been following Jyn.  _ Jyn with the twisting knife scar down her calf and her training and her tendency to turn her face from whatever surveillance camera she’d noticed. She’d done it so automatically it had to have been habit, the same way he did. That kind of habit doesn’t arise without cause.  _ Ex-military?  _ Maybe, but she didn’t strike him as the type to take orders.  _ Spy?  _ Also possible, but not keeping an eye on him.  _ Criminal? _

…well, she was shifty enough.

_ Get her somewhere safe, _ she’d snapped. A demand, not an order. And he’d snapped to, in a way he hasn’t snapped to in years, because of—something. Deep inside. Not trust, he thinks. Not quite. Just…an instinct.

Whoever or whatever Jyn Erso is, he thinks, he can trust her. At least, a little more than he can trust anybody in London. Except maybe Kei.

He pours coffee, and sorts that thought into another box, to be turned over another time.

Teckla Minnau’s taken off her coat, by the time he comes back in the room. She takes the offered mug with both hands, her nails painted the same bright scarlet as her coat, as her lips. She thanks him, quietly, and it strikes him in that moment that she could be his mother. Probably in her fifties, for all she looks younger. She says, “Have you heard from the police?”

“They don’t exactly tell me their schedules,” says Cassian, and sips his own coffee. “I’m sure some PCs will be along when they get the chance. You want cream or sugar?”

“Black is fine.”

He drops back into his chair, and taps the mouse to wake his desktop. 

“I’m sorry,” says Minnau. “I’ve been thinking and I really—really don’t see why anyone would come after me. I really don’t.”

“That’s all right.” The article Jyn had found is still up on the screen. Cassian minimizes it, and types  _ coruscant design teckla minnau  _ into the search box. In the corner of the screen, a chat bubble bursts to life. Kei.  _ PCs on way to office. Explain??? _ He blows air out through his nose, and closes the box again. Even if someone had recognized him on the surveillance footage, it’s a bit fast for them to turn up all the same.  _ Somebody called the police.  _ Her bio on the Coruscant Design page is very simple and aesthetically sorted, just educational background, design specialties. Nothing about her span of time as an embassy translator. “Anything that’s happened in recent weeks that seemed odd or exceptional to you might be relevant, Miss Minnau. Is there anything at all that’s happened that might cause something like this?”

“ _ No _ .” She shifts the coffee in her hands. “No, not—not at all.”

There’s a chip, on her fingernail polish. She picks at it, and doesn’t look at him.

“Miss Minnau,” he says. “The woman on that birth certificate, Jane Martha Barrie, is a false identity. That much I know. If you  _ are  _ the informant for that birth, then you would have had to have known that. I don’t know if Bail Organa made a deal with a woman to provide her with a false identity in return for her child, or if something considerably more complicated happened nineteen years ago, but keeping silent now is not going to help anybody.”

“It’s not me,” says Minnau. “I don’t know who that informant is, but it’s not me. I’d—I’d remember being an informant on a birth certificate. I really would.”

The chat bubble pops up again.  _ If you are ignoring me because the PCs are already there, that is acceptable. If there is another reason, I will be hacking your computer in ninety seconds. _

Cassian types,  _ in an interview _ , and then leans back into his chair. “I see,” he says.

Minnau lifts her head, and looks at him for a while. “Your friend,” she says. “You called her Jyn. Is she all right?”

“I presume so.”

“Oh.” She turns the mug in her palms again. “I see.”

“Jyn can take care of herself,” he says. He hasn’t had a chance to use a business card in weeks, and he always feels awkward about it, offering the little snippet of paper like it’s supposed to be helpful in any way. “The police will be here soon, Miss Minnau. But if anything at all comes back to you, even if it seems insignificant, please give me a call. It would help Miss Organa, I think.”

“Maybe.” Minnau looks down into her coffee mug. “But I really don’t know anything about it.”

And that, he thinks, is all he’s going to get from her about it. At least, without more ammunition. Cassian sighs—through his nose, not through his mouth, a genuine one—and says, “Sorry to bother you, then.”

“You’re doing your job,” says Minnau stiffly. “You can’t help it.”

“True.” He pets his thumb down the handle of his mug. “One last question, if I may, Miss Minnau.”

She doesn’t reply.

“Do you know anyone named Kenobi?” Cassian says. “Ben Kenobi?”

Minnau doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t jump, either. She doesn’t twitch, she doesn’t gasp, she doesn’t stop breathing. She tips her head after a moment, lips moving around the name,  _ Ben Kenobi _ , before shaking her head. Her hair falls out from behind her ears. “No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I— _ Ben  _ Kenobi? You’re sure it was Ben?”

“Yes.”

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry, I don’t. Is he connected to this, do you think?”

_ Damn.  _ “We’re following all possible leads.”

“I knew  _ a  _ Kenobi once,” she says. “But he was named Obi-Wan, not Ben. And he died, years ago. It’s not a common name, but—I mean. I don’t know. They might not be related.”

“How long, exactly?”

“Oh, lord, I don’t know. Fifteen years ago?” She smooths her skirt again. “Maybe more. I can’t remember. I met him through work, and even then it was only once or twice. I remember I didn’t hear about him dying until months after it happened.”

He writes the name down anyway. “How did he die?”

“In a boating accident, I think,” she says. “On the Mediterranean. I’m not entirely sure. Like I said, I didn’t know him at all, I just heard about it after the fact.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Of course,” says Minnau, and smiles with no teeth. “Anything to help.”

They both sit, lies sprawled heavy between them. There’s nothing more to be said.

.

 

.

 

.

Jyn has had a long-standing habit of keeping a change of clothes in her bag at all times. It’s something she’d picked up when she’d worked with Partisan, a quick change in a public toilet, tucking all her hair up or leaving it down, sunglasses on or off, a dash of dark or bright lipstick to change the tinge to her lips. She hasn’t broken the habit yet, and if she stops to think about it, she doesn’t want to; she feels safer when she walks out of a room a different person than she’d walked in, different hair, different eyes, different face. It’s why her scarves are reversible, and her hats are unpatterned. It’s with her work clothes tucked away in the bottom of her bag with the phone numbers, and her new persona—dark skinny jeans, a jean jacket, sunglasses, and a Black Sabbath T-shirt, frayed at the hem—firmly in place that she leaves the Tottenham Court Road tube station and turns up Charing Cross Road, the cut on her cheek scrubbed clean as best she can manage with frigid water from a public water fountain. It’s still puffy, and she can’t exactly cover it, but her hair’s down and her clothes are different and that, at least, has to be enough.

She’d waited until she’d been sure the police wouldn’t have found the office at Denmark Place. She’d debated, sitting in tube stations all over the city, if she should go back at all. She could just…vanish again, like she had before. Use one of the identities that the police hadn’t figured out seven years ago, and fade out of London. She’d thought about it for much longer than she should have, and then she’d chucked the idea in the bin like her cheap reversible scarf. No point, she thinks, sullen. No fucking point. And she’d promised Bodhi she’d let him know if things changed for her.

_ ‘s nice, _ he’d said, when she’d taken the flat in Islington.  _ It’s—it’s homey. Y’know? Nice. You’re sure you’re all right with me sleeping here when I get back from tours and things? _

Fuck,  _ Bodhi.  _ Bodhi will do a nut if he sees her cheek the way it is. He’ll flip in the way that only Bodhi can flip, fluttering and anxious and big doe eyes begging her in silence not to get hurt again.  _ Fucking hell.  _ She turns down a skinny side street, and kicks a can into the gutter.

There’s no sign of movement in the second floor windows. No police cars anywhere up or down the street, but then again, it’s been four hours; if they turned up at all, they’ve been and gone, unless her truly shitty luck has taken a turn for the worse. Jyn puts all her weight on her good foot, twists her sprained ankle around in a slow wide circle— _ fuck shit damn fuck hell _ —and then starts up the metal stairs, ignoring the odd look from one of the people kipping in front of the café windows.

The office door is locked. When she turns the key, slips it back into her messenger bag, there’s a thump in the back office. Andor, probably. Two coffee cups in the sink, and the corpse of the paper bag from the visit this morning, half the muffin she’d never finished eating. She’s picking at it with two fingers when Andor limps down the hall, and just looks at her for a minute or two.

“You changed clothes,” he says, when she offers him no lifeline.

“Yeah.” Jyn crams the last of the muffin into her mouth, and swallows it almost whole. “Had them in my bag.”

“Right,” says Andor, as if this is perfectly normal. Maybe it is, to a private investigator. Jyn wipes crumbs off her hands. “Didn’t expect you back today.”

She shrugs, uncomfortably. She’d come up with some kind of excuse, on the way over— _ forgot my flat keys, _ that’d been it, but to say it now—eh. No point.

“Police want to talk to you,” says Andor, with studied casualness. “They were here for a bit. Took my statement. It was unpleasant.”

“Yeah, well.”  _ You’re the one who pissed them off with some investigation, my lad, that’s your own fault.  _ “Glad I missed that.”

“Was that taekwondo you were using back there?” he says, still with that professional mask on his face, carefully inquisitive. “I had a coworker once who was learning taekwondo, but you’re better than he ever was.”

She ignores that. It's fishing, and she never responds to fishing. Especially not when it's so blatantly casual. “Did Minnau say anything?”

“No,” says Cassian, and then again: “No, she didn’t say anything I wasn’t already expecting.”

That doesn’t answer her question at all, and they both know it. Jyn yanks open the top right-hand drawer to the front desk, and paws through it for her phone charger. Her phone had finally given up about two hours into her jaunt around London to avoid the police, and she is  _ not  _ looking forward to getting the thing working again. If she didn’t have Bodhi texting her at all hours, she might not have a phone at all. She feels safer without a walking GPS dot on her forehead.

“Hey,” says Andor. “Is your face all right?”

“It’s fine.” She plugs the USB cord into the computer, hooks up her phone. The screen flickers back to life beneath the cracks.  _ I’ve had worse.  _ “I’ll call Karrde tonight and let him know that I’m leaving the office before the week is up.”

“Why?” says Andor.

“Don’t,” Jyn snaps.

“Don’t what?”

“That.” She gestures at him as best she can, and then says, “The friendly shit you do to get answers, don’t do that. I’m calling Karrde in the morning. I just came back to get my things.”

Her phone goes off. Three texts from Bodhi, the most recent being  _ hey, you all right?, _ a phone call from Temporary Solutions (probably Mara nagging her to submit her time sheets), and a calendar option that simply read  _ Baze.  _ She’d meant to call Baze today to let him know she’d be missing training tomorrow.  _ Oops.  _ Jyn sits down, and brings up the Temporary Solutions website, logging in with her tongue between her teeth. Andor’s watching her, leaning back against the dividing wall between the little counter and the back office, arms crossed over his chest. There’s a pucker between his eyebrows, a twist that looks almost painful.

“ _ What _ ,” Jyn snaps, when he doesn’t look away from her for ninety whole seconds.

“Nothing,” says Andor.

_ New message to: Bodhi _

_ fine dnt worry back soon _

“Bullshit, nothing.”

“I’m just curious,” he says, and there it is, finally, some kind of reaction, a tightness to his voice and a tapping finger against his upper arm, “where the hell you learned to do that.”

_ New message from: Bodhi _

_ Did something happen? _

“I live in London,” Jyn says. “I adapted.”

“Most people in London don’t have the first clue how to throw a punch, let alone use a baton the way you do.”

“I liked learning.”

_ New message to: Bodhi _

_ will exp later _

The finger taps again. “You really expect me to believe that?”

“My life is none of your  _ fucking business, _ Andor.” She slams the drawer back into the desk. “If it bothers you, I’ll go, whatever, I don’t care, just—stop asking me stupid questions about things that are none of your business, all right?”

He’s gone quiet again, watching her. She turns her phone back off, chucks it into her messenger bag none-too-gently, and stands. Her ankle nearly gives out under her again, and she fucking  _ hates  _ her stupid  _ bloody  _ instinct to kick the bastard in the knee with her  _ bad foot _ , why had she been so absolutely stupid as to think that would work?  _ Because it had, _ Saw whispers,  _ you just need to ignore the pain until you get home _ , but fat bloody chance when she has Andor staring at her and leaning away from the wall like he’s about to catch her by the elbow, as if she’s some fainting damsel in need of rescue. She falls back into the chair, and yanks the drawer back open to get at the paracetamol.

“I was actually going to call Karrde and ask him to extend your contract,” Andor says. “So long as you’re comfortable with it.”

Jyn swallows three tablets, and leans back. The fight drains out of her, and it leaves her arms and legs swimming in low-gravity, her fingers shaking a little. She doesn’t look at him, drains the last of her water bottle and tosses that into the bin. “Why?”

“You’re good at this,” he says. “And I could use the help. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want, but I’d appreciate it.”

“Why?” she says again. Andor pushes away from the wall.

“Those men showed up for a reason. If it was for us or Minnau, it doesn’t matter. Somebody wanted to stop her from talking, or to stop us from talking to her, and either way, there’s something deeper here.”

That’s obvious, she thinks. She puts her good foot down, pushes the rolling chair back and forth, spinning awkwardly to give herself a chance to think. “You figure it’s related to Bail Organa’s murder?”

Andor shrugs. “There’s no evidence of that so far.”

“Shadowy goons are enough for me,” she says, “but suit yourself.”

The corners of his mouth curl again. The smile, if it was one, vanishes almost immediately. Andor rubs his palm over his mouth, scuffing at the beard and mustache. “I need to get Teckla Minnau’s home address.”

“You stalking her now?”

“She knows something. She wouldn’t tell me. Whether she was protecting someone, or protecting herself, I don’t know, but if the police take her off twenty-four-hour guard—they’ve put her on that, by the way, they didn’t like the look of the attack in the slightest—”

“ _ Brilliant, _ ” says Jyn darkly.

“—then she might be vulnerable.”

“If they weren’t after us.”

“Well, yes.” He rubs at his mouth again. “I’m waiting for a contact of mine in the United States to track down Bail Organa’s head of security while he was working in Mexico. Hopefully something else will turn up.”

Jyn frowns. “Since when do you have American government contacts?”

Andor looks at her for a while. Then, carefully, he says, “I met Bey when I was working with Mexican Special Forces. We’ve kept in touch. She’s Air Force.”

_ The Fuerzas Especiales?  _ Jesus. She sucks her teeth, and then catches him still watching her, waiting, eyebrows raised. “She your ex-girlfriend?”

The lines around his eyes go deep, all of a sudden. “No,” says Andor, tonelessly. “Definitely not.”  

He’s not going to ask, she realizes. He  _ could  _ push for a return, detail for detail, but he’s just…not going to. When he turns to put the kettle on, spoon more of the strong coffee she’d brought from home into the cafetière, she swears under her breath.

_ Come on, Jyn. Trust goes both ways. _

“My guardian taught me how to fight,” she says, finally. “After my parents died.”

He considers that, turns it over in his mind the way someone else might turn over a geode before cracking it open. She can see it in the hitch in his shoulders, the way he pauses before spooning another lump of coffee grounds into the press. “I see.” 

“I picked up taekwondo myself, though,” she adds. “My guardian had—had people teach me MMA. But I practice others too. Every week.” Her lips are very dry, all of a sudden. “Eskrima stick fighting, too.”

“Right,” says Andor. “You want coffee?”

Jyn swallows, and then says, “Please.”

“There’s a first aid kit in my office,” he adds. “I left it out on the desk. You should clean that cut, at least.”

He goes to find her a mug before she can reply. 

.

 

.

 

.

Talon Karrde does  _ not  _ want to hire Jyn out for another week.

“Jyn actually had another temping job scheduled to begin next Monday,” he says, when Cassian calls early the next morning. Karrde has the kind of polished accent that only comes with practice; Cassian wouldn’t be surprised if he’d trained himself into it, to get more clients from higher economic ends of the scale. “I can send you another temp, if you like, but—”

“I would prefer it if she stay on,” Cassian says. “She knows the filing system. And there’s been a scheduling issue, so I wouldn’t be able to explain to a new temp where things go.”

Karrde digests that in silence. “Still—”

“I’m willing to pay for it,” Cassian says, and prays that whatever he finds will be enough for Leia Organa to continue keeping him on to investigate. “For another week. I’ve already cleared it with her, she’s all right with staying.”

“I understand, Mr. Andor, but this second client asked for Jyn specifically. She’s worked with them before, too, and there’s—circumstances which mean she’s the best suited for this next position.” Karrde sucks his teeth, and then says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“I appreciate it.”

“She’s doing well, there, then?” Karrde says. There’s razors between the words, all of a sudden. Like someone’s slid glass into a fruitcake. “No issues?”

“None,” says Cassian. He wonders if the attack has made it onto the news yet. “She’s very good at her job.”

“I see.” There’s a muffled female voice from the other end. Karrde says something unintelligible. Then: “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Karrde.”

“We aim to please, Mr. Andor,” says Karrde, and hangs up. Cassian taps his mobile into his palm a few times, and then gets up to go brush his teeth in the public toilet before Jyn comes back from her sojourn to the police station.

She is  _ not  _ in a good mood when she returns. Her cheek’s puffed up—that happens, he thinks, when you take a bit of glass to the face—and the tape holding the cut closed seems to be straining to keep her temper in check. “Stupid puking little  _ moron _ ,” she says, and drops hard into the desk chair.

“Sorry,” Cassian says.

“Not you, the  _ stupid  _ fucking PC I had to talk to,  _ Christ. _ ” She jabs the password out with the tip of her pen—she’s painted her nails black—and then says, “I hate the police. And they  _ really  _ don’t like you.”

He shrugs. “I made my own bed. I have to lie in it.”

“Is it true you gave your whole investigation to the  _ Daily Mail  _ to publish?”

Cassian adds sugar to his coffee, and doesn’t turn around. “A good man died because of their mistakes. It was necessary.”

“Right.”

He adds sugar to the second mug, too, and a little bit of milk, and then offers it to her. Jyn blinks at the color, looks up at him in surprise. He doesn’t say anything about it. “I heard from Kei this morning.”

Her whole face curdles. “Did you.”

“He found something out about the bank account Leia Organa brought in.” Cassian sips at his coffee, and wonders if the little tug in the corner of his mouth is a smothered smile. It feels strange, whatever it is. “I was going to go meet him this afternoon.”

“Well, that’s good timing,” says Jyn, and peers at the computer screen. “If you kill him before you come back, don’t tell me. I don’t want to be incriminated.”

“You’re coming,” says Cassian, and steps away from the counter. Jyn makes a noise that’s a cross between a squawk and a yip, and glares at him.

“ _ Why _ ?”

“Because it’ll be easier than having to explain it all a second time.” It’s an actual laugh, bubbling in his throat. He hasn’t wanted to laugh in a long while. But the look on her face is pure wet cat, scandalized and disgruntled all in one, and he’s maybe more than a little slaphappy from utter exhaustion. Besides, there’s an odd kind of playfulness tickling against the inside of his ribs. He wants to see what happens if he teases. “Besides, he’s not that bad.”

“You’re mad,” says Jyn in disgust, and jabs her pen into the keyboard again. “Fine. I’ll be missing all the phone calls this afternoon, though.”

“There won’t be any phone calls this afternoon.”

“You don’t know that.”

He lifts his hand to the empty room, to say,  _ Are you sure of that?  _ “I’d be surprised if you missed anything.”

She scowls.

“If you don’t want to come, it’s all right.” He cups both hands around his mug. “I’m not going to force you.”

“Shut up,” says Jyn, “and let me look for Teckla Minnau’s address.”

Cassian flees to the back office before the laugh can escape his throat.

Yavin is a tiny coffee shop a few blocks away from Kei’s apartment in Islington, a homey little place run by two Mexican men from Tucson, Arizona who fled the United States after everything that had happened in the election of 2016. Cassian’s not sure they’ve come to the right place—Brexit had gone on  _ long  _ before the election—but they’re surviving, and they’re married, now, which he supposes is better than nothing. They get along with Kei purely through the virtue of letting everything Kei says roll of their backs like rainwater, and providing him coffee when he gets too grouchy. Cassian tries not to turn up at Yavin too often, simply because it makes him a little homesick. It always smells a little like empanadas, and the coffee is always made strong enough to kick a horse, and the worst time of the year is during the turn from October to November. Día de los Muertos usually comes and goes without any fanfare from London, but there are always little bouquets of marigolds tucked into the vases on the tabletops at Yavin. It makes something knot tight in his throat, to see them. He may not have had time, not as a child or as an adult, to truly celebrate any kind of holiday, but there’d always been a soft spot somewhere in him for Día de Muertos. 

Kei’s taken the table in the back, as is his usual haunt, and spread out his paperwork across the wood. There aren’t many other people in Yavin today, a pair of women in the windowseats holding hands and talking about philosophy, a uni student of indeterminate gender with a pile of economics textbooks and a look like they’re seeing death plastered on their face. Cassian lifts his chin to Kei, and Jyn says, “I’m getting coffee first.”

“Up to you,” he says, and watches Kei’s face turn near-metallic with displeasure at the sight of Jyn.

“Do you want anything?”

“I’m good.”

Jyn looks at him, and then at Kei. She lifts an eyebrow. “Right.”

“I’m fine, Jyn,” he says again.

“Fine.” She pushes away from him. “Last time I’m ever nice to you.”

She’s gone before he can reply. Behind the coffee counter, Héctor, the taller one of the pair, smirks at him and lifts a cup in a little salute. Cassian turns his face away before Héctor say something stupid.

“You brought the secretary,” says Kei, as Cassian pulls a third chair around to the little table. He scowls at his computer screen. “I was not aware you would be bringing the secretary.”

“Does it matter that Jyn came?” Cassian eases down into one of the seats, stretching his prosthetic out at an odd angle to get the weight off his stump. The leg of his trousers rides up. He prods at the cloth until it settles again. “What did you find?”

“Why did you bring the secretary?”

“She’s helpful.”

“She’s helpful at potentially getting you arrested,” says Kei, sour. “I watched her interview with Police Constable Stevens this morning. She is very combative.”

“They let you watch it?”

Kei gives him a Look. “It was not difficult to observe via the surveillance cameras.”

_ Right.  _ “Her combativeness was very helpful, yesterday.”

“I assume you are referring to the incident with Teckla Minnau.” Kei goes back to tapping at his keyboard. His shoulders are drawn up tight around his ears. At this angle, he looks almost like a wriggling cat, back raised, ready to strike. “You will be gratified to learn that there has been a police watch put up on Minnau’s apartment. She has not been accosted a second time. The man that the secretary incapacitated was carrying no ID, and he was released on bail after his solicitor arrived. She,” Kei adds, “is  _ very  _ highly paid. Far beyond the budget of a simple hired thug. I would look into her background, were I you.”

“What’s her name?”

“Asajj Ventress,” says Kei. “Primarily serves as a solicitor on behalf of Imperial Enterprises.”

He gives Cassian A Look, like this is supposed to prove something. Cassian writes:

 

and then says, “I see.”

“She will probably rob you,” Kei says.

“Asajj Ventress? Only if I hire her.”

“No.” Kei scowls again. “The secretary. She will probably rob you.”

“I don’t have much to rob,” says Cassian. “The computer in the office is ten years old and only works half the time. And my laptop is dying.”

“You are being deliberately obtuse.” Kei shoves his spectacles up, hard enough to clock himself in the face. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Nobody carries a collapsible baton unless they intend to use it on somebody, and clearly, you are in the most vulnerable position, as you must tolerate her presence for seven hours a day in the close confines of your office.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Your leg means you cannot necessarily fight back with the same level of acuity that you could have prior to its amputation.” Kei frowns. “She may kill you. There is a high possibility of this occurring somehow.”

“She’s not going to kill me,” says Cassian. “What did you find?”

Kei blinks. “Find?”

“The bank account, Kei.”

“Right. The Swiss bank account.” Kei shoves a pile of his papers forward, nearly into Cassian’s lap. It’s bank records, he thinks. There are too many numbers here for him to parse without his reading glasses. “That proved to be more difficult than anticipated.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Clearly, or I would not have texted you.” Kei shoves his thin, rimless glasses up his nose again, and sniffs, loudly. “The bank account was opened almost precisely one month prior to the birth of Leia Organa, on the first of April, 1998. There was no security footage of that day simply because the amount of time between the opening of the account and the present day means that even if there  _ had  _ been, it would presumably be on VHS tape, and as it has not been uploaded to the bank’s servers, it is inaccessible to me. However, I can tell you that it was opened under the name of Dormé Rivera, originally of Barcelona, Spain.”

Cassian winces. “Can you not lisp it, please?”

“That is the accurate Castilian pronunciation of Barcelona,” says Kei. “Actually, there is a popular urban legend which indicates that a Spanish king in the Renaissance period spoke with a lisp, and the court—and later, the populace—emulated him in an attempt to not embarrass him at public events. I find the whole idea rather ridiculous—it seems more accurate for the poor to highlight a royal dysfunction simply to lash out at those they could not revolt against—but it is a charming story nonetheless.”

“This is England anyway,” Cassian says. “Please don’t lisp.”

“Lisp what?” says Jyn, as she slides into the chair next to him and prods a coffee in front of him. Kei watches this with both his eyebrows nesting in his hair.

“Spanish,” says Kei. “Cassian is an anarchist who refuses to accept proper Castilian pronunciation of Spanish words because he views those who conquered the territory which eventually became the nation of Mexico as horrific tyrants unworthy of mention.”

“I’m not an anarchist,” says Cassian. “And that’s not the point.”

“They slaughtered thousands of people and destroyed an entire nation just to get their hands on gold,” says Jyn, without batting an eyelash.

“For a former member of the European Union, you’re being strikingly non-imperialist.”

“I don’t give a damn,” says Jyn. “Besides, the lisp sounds stupid.”

“It is the  _ proper pronunciation, _ ” Kei says.

Jyn sips at her coffee, and says, “ _ Me vale madres. _ ”

Cassian burns his tongue on his coffee.

“That was unnecessarily rude,” says Kei, his eyebrows crinkling together. He looks at Cassian, and then sighs through his nose. “Regardless. The bank account, at least in name, belongs to Dormé Rivera, of Barcelona.” He drags it out, the  _ th _ , until it just verges on obnoxious. “But it does not, I believe, actually belong to her.”

“How so?”

“According to her personal accounting records and internet trails, Dormé Rivera has not left Spain in more than twenty years.”

“And before that?”

“She was a frequent international traveler. According to government records, Rivera worked for some time as a legal analyst. Her name is attached to several studies on the interplay between big business corporations and human rights violations in the developing world; she conducted interviews and assisted on cases for the firm Kryze & Robb, which folded in 1998. When the firm collapsed, Rivera left the international stage, joined a pro bono firm specializing in environmental law, and as I said, she has not left Spain since.”

“Since Leia Organa was born,” says Cassian.

“At first glance, it appears that Dormé Rivera could be Leia Organa’s mother, yes,” says Kei. “But I broke into her medical records. Dormé Rivera has severe endometriosis which has rendered her completely sterile. She has suffered from the condition since she was a teenager. Unless the medical records have been very cleverly faked, it is impossible that she could be Organa’s birth mother.”

Jyn’s eyes dart between him and Kei. She stays quiet, and pulls out her mobile. Whatever she’s doing, she’s still paying attention, at least. Her ears are pricked like a cat’s.

“So why is the account under her name?”

“Because—and this is a theory, but it is highly likely that it is accurate—I believe someone stole Dormé Rivera’s identity in order to open the account. Considering that whoever signed Organa’s birth certificate already has displayed—or had displayed—a penchant for false names, I do not believe that this is entirely out of the realm as possibility.”

“So this is another dead end,” Jyn says. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

“I am not finished,” Kei says. “I broke into the mainframe of the bank and ran a backtrace. This was illegal, and I will be charging you double my usual fee for it.”

Cassian waves his hand. “Fine.”

“Not fine.” Jyn leans forward. “How much is this exactly?”

“I made my deal with Cassian,” says Kei, snottily. “It is off-the-books, and none of your business.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing work for the Met right now?” Jyn says, poison-sweet, and goes back to whatever she’s doing on her mobile phone. It’s not a phone game, he doesn’t think. There are too many thoughts crammed into the wrinkles in her forehead. Cassian sips his coffee again, and looks at Kei.

“Kei,” he says. “What else?”

Kei shakes himself a little. “The money transfers come into Leia Organa’s account from Dormé Rivera’s Switzerland account, but the money itself is not held in that account for more than two days at a time,” he says. “The cash is wired electronically, and bounced through a multitude of dummy accounts in multiple countries, including the UAE, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Zimbabwe, and a multitude of locations in the United States, including a server placed in the middle of the Nevada desert which I…believe is military. Eventually it winds up in Switzerland, and from there it is deposited into the savings account held in trust by Bail Organa on behalf of the girl. Now that Bail Organa has been murdered, the administrator of his estate will turn over ownership of the account on her twenty-first birthday. From what I can determine, the deposits will not be halted until that time.”

“Did you find where the transactions originated?”

“I would not have called if I had not,” says Kei. He hits a few keys on his computer, and turns it so Cassian can see the screen. There’s a photograph, there, an older, dark-skinned man, hair trimmed neatly, face partially hidden behind reflective sunglasses. His bearing says ex-military. His clothes and earpiece say security.

“Brilliant,” says Jyn. “More people who’d like to stab us in the street.”

“This man is Quarsh Panaka,” says Kei, ignoring her. “His family are Ghanaian immigrants to the United Kingdom. He grew up in Dorset, joined the Army, served multiple tours, returned to England, and founded an international security analysis firm, mainly contracting with international figures in both the political and legal domains.”

_ Security analysis— _ “Naboo Security Services,” says Cassian after a moment. “The original account is in the name of the man who  _ founded the NSS _ ?”

“So it appears.”

_ That makes no sense, _ Cassian starts to say, but—no. The NSS is an organization with a good twenty-five years of work under its belt. Organa, as an American ambassador, would possibly have had cause to meet with them at some point. Especially considering Bail Organa’s personal interest in counterterrorism and international security.  _ This just keeps getting deeper. _ “Any record of Bail Organa ever coming into contact with Naboo Security Services?”

“Not that I can determine,” says Kei. “Bail Organa’s accounts are being monitored by INTERPOL. I gathered what information I could through a phishing bug, but there was no evidence of any relationship between Bail Organa and the NSS. At least, nothing that was paid for. It is possible they had a personal relationship my algorithms would not have detected.”

“So, what—” Jyn leans back in her chair, shoves her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. “Panaka’s Leia Organa’s father, then?”

They can’t rule it out. Cassian rubs his hands over his face. “There’s something here,” he says, into his palms.  _ You used to be better at this. You used to be able to put things like this together. _ Teckla Minnau, a witness who wouldn’t talk; Dormé Rivera, away in Barcelona and possibly not even aware that there was a Swiss account in her name;  _ Quarsh Panaka _ , depositing 75,000 pounds every year and sending it through an obscene amount of transfers to try and erase any trail.  _ A for-hire security professional, an international humanitarian lawyer, and a translator for the British government.  _ Connected somewhere and somehow. A person, a place. There’s too much overlap between the three of them— _ four of them,  _ Bail Organa’s inexorable from this, with so much money and so many tendrils stretching out in every direction it’s impossible that this could be a simple adoption from a Serbian orphanage—for it not to have originated between the four of them. Possibly more. “There’s something here.”

“Clearly,” says Kei. “Otherwise we would not be sitting here.”

His stump hurts. He rubs the back of his neck instead, trying not to look at either of them. “I’ll reach out to Leia Organa and try to get more material,” he says. “Try to find any link between Bail Organa and Panaka. INTERPOL will have confiscated most of his work papers, but it’s possible that there’s still something accessible to her that might point to a connection between the Organas and the NSS. Barring that—”  _ barring that, you can always ask Tonc.  _ He hasn’t spoken to Stordan Tonc since he lost his leg, but it’s…possible Tonc might reply. So far as Cassian knows, he’s been in the private sector for the last four years. He might have some contact he can lean on to get data. “I’ll work something out.”

“Right.”

“No need,” says Jyn mildly, and doesn’t look up from her phone. Kei rears back, a cobra about to strike.

“Are you taking some kind of hallucinogen?”

“No,” Jyn says. She bares her teeth, more shark than smile. “Sounds fun, though.”

_ See, _ Kei’s triumphant look at him says. _ Criminal. _ “I am affiliated with the police,” he says. “I arguably have cause to arrest you.”

“Don’t be a twat,” says Jyn, and leans forward to peer closer at her phone. “No, I mean there’s no need to break into INTERPOL yet. I know how they’re connected.”

Cassian’s heart skips.

“Impossible,” says Kei, stiffly. “I only uncovered the NSS connection ninety-six minutes prior to contacting Cassian. You have known about it for a total of four minutes. At most. How could you have—”

“You checked Dormé Rivera’s work background,” she says. “Did you find any connection to Bail Organa?”

There’s a beat. “It is most likely that her identity was stolen by Quarsh Panaka,” says Kei, stiffly. “Or by someone operating on his behalf.”

“But did you check?”

“I ran a general search algorithm and discovered nothing linking them in their respective employment histories.”

“Your search algorithm is shite,” says Jyn, and puts her phone down on the table. She zooms in on a photo. “You said she worked for a firm called Kryze & Robb, right?”

“Correct,” says Kei. Cassian takes Jyn’s phone, and peers at the screen. It’s…not what he expected. It’s a photograph of Bail Organa, younger, probably in the eighties judging by his hair and the cut of his suit. He’s standing with a handful of men and women near a bombed-out car, surrounded by men in black bullet-proof vests marked  _ POLICÍA _ . The caption reads,  _ una colección de abogadas internacionales despues una bomba explota en Bolívar Plaza. _ Something drops hard into Cassian’s stomach. He zooms in again, flicking from face to face to face. “Until the firm folded in 1998.”

“Bail Organa was a lawyer focusing in international law before he was appointed the U.S. Ambassador to the U.K.,” says Jyn. She pushes her chair up off the floor, tilting until she’s balanced on only two legs. “In the late 1980s he was in Bogotá, Colombia, with a team of lawyers that was attacked by one of the cartels. They were trying to prosecute one of the big bosses, a guy they were just calling  _ El Tritón _ , and he tried to have them killed off, apparently.”

_ El Tritón.  _ The Newt. “Nute Gunray?”

“I don’t know. It just says  _ El Tritón  _ in the article.” Jyn gives him a look, more evaluating than curious,

“I do not see how—”

“Both Satine Kryze and Kin Robb were a part of that legal team in 1985,” she says. She taps the tabletop with one finger. “They’re listed in the article. Organa isn’t, but you can see him in the photo, there. He was  _ there.  _ And Rivera was an associate of Kryze & Robb back then too, you said that yourself. He probably knew Rivera, too.”

Kei purses his lips. “It is a link, but at this point it is weak. There is no evidence that Bail Organa ever met Rivera at all. Besides, it does not a provide a link between Kryze & Robb and the NSS.” 

“Because you didn’t let me finish,” says Jyn, flint-eyed. She takes the phone back, flips to another tab. “This one.”

The article’s in English, this time. An archived article from the  _ London Times.  _ Cassian scrolls, and scans. He’s looking for data more than grammar, names, dates.  _ 31 April, 1998. Wife of Force Enterprises Weapons Development Assassinated. Padmé Amidala Skywalker, 27, wife of Anakin Skywalker, CEO of Force Enterprises, stabbed in the streets of London today— Amidala-Skywalker, an associate of the international humanitarian legal firm Kryze & Robb— _

He finds a photo, and stops.

Jyn looks triumphant.

“I do not see it,” says Kei.

Padmé Amidala is a small woman. She’s dressed well, very expensively, and her hair is trimly pulled back from her moonish, sharp-eyed face. She’s also  _ very  _ pregnant; Cassian hasn’t had a lot of experience with pregnant people, but he’d guess her to be at eight months, at the least. She’s flanked on one side by a woman, small and dark and slim as Amidala herself, head tucked close to the papers she’s filing through. On Amidala’s other side, there’s a compact, dark-skinned man, sunglasses perched on his nose and an earpiece in his ear. Even with the glasses, he’s  _ very  _ recognizable.

“Quarsh Panaka,” says Cassian, and rubs at his eyes.    __

“Quarsh Panaka guarding an associate at Kryze & Robb,” says Jyn. “And I will bet real human money that the woman standing next to her is Dormé Rivera.”

She leans back, and looks triumphantly at both of them.

Kei says, “I still don’t like you.”

She sips at her coffee, and doesn’t bother to reply. 

.

 

.

 

.

The rest of the day is eaten up by phone calls. They have  _ many  _ people to contact, now. There’s Quarsh Panaka—“I’m sorry,” his assistant says, on the fifth attempt, “he’s in Afghanistan right now, you’re going to have to call back in a week”—and then Dormé Rivera, and anyone left behind by Padmé Amidala. Satine Kryze, too, and Kin Robb. Satine Kryze died in Serbia in 1995, Jyn discovers. Caught in the crossfire between a soldier and a Muslim child. Kin Robb has retired to Australia, and her phone number is proving elusive. Rivera is on vacation, according to the firm she works for. Jyn leaves a message for her anyway, ignoring the eyebrows hiking up Cassian’s forehead when she does it in Spanish, and then goes back to annoying the administrative staff at the NSS until someone finally gives her a straight answer.

“You speak Spanish,” says Cassian, once she finally pushes back from the desk with both hands. She has a date with a gyro cart, three blocks away.

It’s the stupidest moment to get an intrusive thought, Jyn thinks. Or whatever it is that Bodhi insists on calling them. It doesn’t matter what the psychiatrists call it. All she knows is that for a second she’s back in Partisan territory, and there’s Maia, pointing at one of the mice in the corner.  _ El ratón _ , she says, half-giggling, and Jyn repeats it,  _ el ratón _ , before inking it out in the little notebook she used to keep in her pocket. She shakes the memory off, and shoves her hands into her pockets to hide the trembling in her fingers.

“Learned when I was a kid,” she says.

“You’re English.”

“Irish,” says Jyn. “Mostly. And my—”

_ My father was Danish. _ It sticks on her tongue. She clears her throat. “You want anything?”

“Where are you going?”

“Food,” she says. “And then I was going to come back and call the NSS again.”

“You’ve called them nine times in two hours.”

She shrugs. “Your point?”

Cassian rolls a ball-point pen between his fingers. There’s that uncomfortable feeling again, the one that says he’s trying to pick her apart at the seams. “I need to make some calls, actually,” he says. “There are some people I knew a few years ago who went into private security. They might have more background on Panaka we could use.”

Jyn taps her closed fist against her hip.  _ Spit it out.  _ “And Asajj Ventress?”

“What about her?”

“She works for Imperial Enterprises,” she says. “That’s what Kei said.”

Cassian’s eyes tighten at the corners, just a bit. Not in a smile. “Imperial Enterprises is an international weapons manufacturer and business conglomerate. They’re probably involved in a lot of things. Especially considering the fact that every single person of interest in this case used to work in international law. The number of human rights violations to IE’s name isn’t insignificant.”

“No, I know.” And it’d been stupid to ask. She shrugs her jacket closer around her shoulders. “Never mind.”

“I’ll call her,” Cassian says. He throws his pen onto the desktop. “You keep on Panaka.”

“Yeah,” says Jyn.

“If anyone from IE calls I’ll take it,” he calls, as she opens the front door.

Jyn slams the door closed behind her, and clatters down the stairs.

She doesn’t wind up getting home until gone nine, in spite of her best efforts. She’d missed her session with Baze and Chirrut thanks to everything that had happened with Teckla Minnau—she’d wanted to get inside as soon as possible, so she’d texted Baze, let him know that something had come up so they could lock up the gym an hour earlier than usual, only to get a very amused call from Chirrut on her way into work this morning that Baze had been pouting and needed to beat her up for a while—so she’d had to stay late at the gym until Baze had yanked her so far into a splits that walking up stairs feels as though she’s splitting into four different pieces (each leg, her torso, and her head, toppling off to fall backwards down the stairwell). The front door to her flat is unlocked, though, and she has one hand halfway into her bag to clutch at her baton before she smells the keema, and relaxes.

Bodhi’s in the kitchen. More than that, Bodhi is still in the same sweatpants he’s worn for two days, and a shirt that she regularly steals from him when he goes on tour. He’s At Home Bodhi, not On The Way Out The Door Bodhi, not Bodhi frazzled and tucked into clothes he doesn’t particularly like and forcing sunglasses onto his face to make sure nobody can recognize him. He’s paranoid about being recognized, but it’s  _ Bodhi.  _ Even before the attack, Bodhi had never particularly liked being in the spotlight. He tucks one foot around his other ankle when she comes in, and turns, singeing his finger against the stove.

“ _ Fuck _ .”

“Watch it,” says Jyn, and then tries to take stock of the carnage. Bodhi’s been to Tesco’s. And probably half the Pakistani groceries in the neighborhood, judging by the number of mangos on her countertops. “You forgot to lock the door.”

“Didn’t see the point.” Bodhi sticks his scorched finger in his mouth, and says, “Not like you have anything worth taking.”

“Fuck you,” says Jyn. “Why did you buy so much food? I can’t possibly eat all of it before it goes bad.”

“And if I  _ hadn’t  _ bought so much food you wouldn’t eat at all for the next three weeks. I’ll be gone for three months, I need to at least try to make sure you’re getting enough.”

“I’m twenty-three, Bodhi. I can feed myself.”

“Right.” He studies his finger, and then sticks it under the sink. Over the water, he says, “I’ll be taking some of the mangos with me, anyway.”

“Will they let you on the plane with mangos?”

“The people doing the  _ random security check  _ will probably share one with me,” says Bodhi. “After they get their, um. Their fingers out of my arse. You’re back late.”

“Baze wanted to work on flexibility.” She toes her shoes off, and her hips crack. She can  _ hear it _ , and so can Bodhi; he makes a face, and turns back to the stove. “He’s ticked I was in a fight and didn’t invite him first. I thought you’d have been gone by now. You said your flight was at three.”

“Flight was canceled. Don’t leave until tomorrow.” There’s half a mango on the counter still. Jyn thieves the paring knife from the cutting board, and wedges it into the soft flesh of the mango, slicing it in strips, back and forth, within the skin. “You’re getting better at that.”

“Fuck off,” says Jyn. She puts the knife down, boosts herself up onto the counter, and then folds the mango half at each end, so she can pinch off a little square with two fingers. “I don’t have you to open up my mangos for me, now that you’re being high and mighty off in  _ Brighton _ . I had to learn.”

“Brighton was a terrible show. So you know.” Bodhi takes a smidgeon of mango for himself, and goes back to stirring the keema. “So—so you know.”

Jyn reaches out with her bad foot, prods him in the leg. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “You?”

Jyn shrugs, and eats another bit of mango. “Where’s your next show?”

“I told you, I have to go to the US. They want me up and down the east coast, if—if nothing goes wrong. At least.” Bodhi’s eyebrows draw together, just a little. “How’s your face feeling this morning?”

“Fine. It was just a bit of glass.”

Bodhi just about vibrates out of his own skin with concern, for a second or two. He says, “I didn’t think you’d stay.”

“I missed practice yesterday,” says Jyn. “Baze gets particular.”

“That’s not what I meant,” says Bodhi. “You—you know what I meant. You know.”

Jyn looks down at the mango in her hands. It’s been dripping steadily onto her sweatpants for the past few minutes. There’s a damp spot against her knee that she doesn’t care enough about to scrub at.

“You hate investigators,” says Bodhi. “You, um—you hate—hate police. And investigators and—those kinds of, y’know. Those kinds of people.”

She strips one of the lines of mango out of the skin, and lays the carcass beside the sink. Bodhi takes a piece or two for himself, but instead of eating them he fidgets. He’s been growing his hair quite long, since he went on tour. Jyn can’t remember a time that his hair has been quite this long. He keeps it back, but it’s probably longer than hers is. She says, finally, “I want to finish this.”

“I know you can’t, um—I know you can’t talk about what you’re doing, y’know, you said, there are legal agreements and—and NDAs and things, but—” He puts his shoulders back. “You’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” says Jyn.

“Only—”

“I’m fine, Bodhi.”

“You always say you’re fine,” says Bodhi. His lips go tight at the corners. “You can quit. I mean. Karrde will—will probably be glad. You said he had something scheduled for you with, um, with that—that company, that—that Christmas supply company.”

“Carols,” says Jyn, and tries to order her stomach not to revolt. “Yes, working for a Christmas supply company in November sounds bloody fantastic, Bodh’. Just what I want to be doing with my time.”

“Don’t be catty,” says Bodhi, and swallows a bit of mango whole. Jyn breaks her piece in two, and then licks juice off her wrist. “Only—Jyn, the last time you had to sit with a policeman you nearly broke his leg and now you’ve gone to an interview with one of them because someone tried to—to attack your boss or something. I don’t—I don’t think you’re fine.”

“Policemen don’t bother me,” says Jyn. “The police do.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does, and you know it.” She slides off the counter, wincing when her bad leg takes on weight. Baze hadn’t pushed her as hard as she could go, wanting to protect her vulnerable ankle, but still. It aches. “I’m all right, Bodhi. Cassian’s—” 

She bites her tongue.  _ Cassian’s quiet, and sad, and doesn’t seem to care that I broke a man’s hip two days ago. _ No. That doesn’t work.  _ Cassian trusted me to handle two enormous muscular goons all on my own and keeps looping me into everything he’s doing like I have some kind of say in all this.  _ That will just give Bodhi heart failure.  _ Cassian might be being actively harassed by a company that took my father to the other side of the world while my mother died from asbestos.  _ Definitely unhelpful. She wets her lips. “—from Mexico. He’s from Mexico, there’s no way he could have heard about what happened. And even if he did, who knows if he’d give a damn. Besides, the police don’t like him either. You remember that story about the slacker cops who let that prize witness get killed?”

“Vaguely?”

“Cassian outed the police to the  _ Daily Mail _ .” She finishes the last bit of mango. “That’s why he’s broke.”

Bodhi says, “I don’t know if that’s ominous or—or reassuring.”

The cat curls around her ankles. Jyn wipes her hands clean of juice, bends, and heaves the beast up into her arms, scratching her nails into the space beneath the cat’s jaw. His rasping, two-tone purr starts rumbling up into her ribs. “You don’t have to worry,” she tells Bodhi, and then kicks him gently in the ankle—the only form of affection she can give him, when she’s holding the cat—before wandering off to take a shower.

Her hair’s still dripping into her collar and she’s bundled into her largest sweatshirt— _ OXFORD  _ is blazoned across the front like some mark from another life, and honestly if she thinks back she can remember stealing this from Bodhi back during his first year at Christ Church. He wrinkles his nose when he sees it, but he waves vaguely back at the kitchen anyway, tucking his feet up underneath him on the couch and trying to keep the cat out of his keema. Jyn scrounges a bowl out of the dishwasher—she always has clean dishes, when Bodhi’s around; it’s a miracle—and snags a bowl of her own before folding into the opposite end of the couch, and sticking her bad leg out to push her toes into the fabric of his sweatpants.

“What,” says Bodhi without looking at her.

“You remind me of Samirah when you fuss,” she says, and Bodhi looks at her through his bangs. His lip jumps at the corner, up and down, like he can’t decide if he wants to smile or not.

“Yeah, well. Learned, um. Learned everything from her, so.” He leans back into the couch, and props his head up on one of the cushions. “You sure you’re all right?”

Jyn drops her head back, and stares at the ceiling.

“You’re being a twit,” says Bodhi. “You can talk to me.”

“I know,” says Jyn, and then kicks him in the leg again. The cat gives her a filthy look, and thunks down onto the floor to sprawl across the carpet. “’m fine, Bodhi. It’s all right. Cassian’s—weird. But he’s not the bad sort, I don’t think. Not really.”

“You actually like him,” says Bodhi, and Jyn kicks him harder. “ _ Christ, _ you gremlin, stop—stop that. Stop it.”

“Fuck off.”

“Twit,” says Bodhi.

“ _ Røvbanan _ ,” says Jyn.

“Get out of here with your Danish,” says Bodhi. “Bloody immigrant.”

“I thought Brexit was supposed to do something about us,” says Jyn, and her mouth twitches when Bodhi snorts. It’s good, to see Bodhi laughing. There’d been times after he’d been hospitalized when she’d thought he’d never laugh again. She kicks him again, gentler, this time, and leaves the balls of her feet pressed against his leg.

“I think he’s homeless,” says Jyn.

“Nigel Farage?”

“Cassian, you arse.” She props her head in one hand. “I think he’s homeless. He sleeps in his office. He knows I know, but he doesn’t mention it. Keeps a camp bed hidden behind his coat rack.”

Bodhi’s quiet for a while. He considers. “He seem all right? Not—not is he dangerous, is he, y’know. Is he doing all right?”

_ No.  _ It’s sharp as salt on her tongue. Cassian Andor, whatever he’s like, is not doing all right. But she’s not sure she should do anything about it, or even if she could. She shouldn’t even  _ care _ , she thinks. She shouldn’t bloody care. Cassian Andor isn’t her problem. Bail Organa isn’t her problem. None of it is her fucking problem. She stirs at her keema, and when she looks at her hand she has it clenched into a tight fist around her spoon, like a toddler smashing pasta.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” says Jyn. She fumbles for the remote. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Jyn,” says Bodhi, and takes the remote from the table before she can reach it. “What is it?”

“Nothing, all right? Doesn’t matter.”

Bodhi doesn’t push. He just gives her a look. Jyn picks at the edge of her thumbnail, digging and digging and digging. The ache is easier to deal with than the world.

“I was just thinking about Maia today,” she says. “That’s all.”

“Maia from Partisan?”

She tucks her chin closer to her chest, and draws both knees up close against herself.

“Christ,” Bodhi says. “Can I ask, um. Can I—Can I ask what brought that on?”

“I had to call someone in Barcelona,” she says.

Bodhi digests that. “You want a beer?”

“You don’t drink.”

“No, but you do, and I bought you some.”

She says, “You’re just filling my fridge because you know I haven’t been paid yet and you’re showing off.”

“Only—only a little.” He unfolds himself from the couch. “You want one?”

“Yeah.”

The cat trails Bodhi into the kitchen, and for a second, she’s alone in the living room, the TV blaring, her hair dripping cold against the slope of her throat. Her eyes hurt. Jyn scrubs hard at her face with the back of her fist, and thinks about how many peppers Bodhi must have put into the keema. She hasn’t had a thought that visceral in months. She’d been doing  _ better _ , for once.  _ Fucking hell. _

Bodhi comes back with a can of beer and a blanket, which he drapes over her knees without comment. Jyn would laugh, if she weren’t afraid making a single sound would set her off into a rage. He squeezes her feet through the wool, and says, “You sure you should be staying? At—at this job?”

She turns the cold beer can over and over in her hands.

“’cause if—if you’d rather, you can, um. I’m sure Talon would shift you somewhere else.” Bodhi peers into her face. “If—if you want to stay, that’s all right too. It’s just—up to you.”

“’m scheduled ‘til the end of next week,” says Jyn. It’s an answer, and not. Bodhi sighs.

“Right.” He leans back against the sofa. “You, um. You ever use any of those numbers I sent you? For people in the PPE program?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, call them soon, will you? I’ve told them to expect you to contact them.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“You said it was for work.”

She could shake him. “Like it’s going to matter to your old mates that your violent little freak of a sister didn’t call them on time.”

His mouth turns down. “They don’t—don’t think of you like that.”

“Right,” says Jyn.

Bodhi sighs through his nose. She’s disappointed him somehow. She’s not sure. Probably something she said. She opens her mouth and knives come out, and she keeps slashing at Bodhi, and that’s the last thing she wants to do. “I’m leaving at seven, tomorrow,” he says, and stands. The sole of her foot feels cold, all at once. “I’ll bring you back something from New York City, yeah?”

Jyn swallows past the boulders in her throat. “I want one of those stupid T-shirts.”

“That’s easy.”

“Not for me,” she says. “For the cat.”

“The cat will—will shred it.” He finds his used water glass. “You’re mental.” 

_ Don’t go on tour, _ she wants to say.  _ Don’t be gone for another three months. Don’t be somewhere far away. You’re the only family I have. I don’t have anybody else. _ All she says is, “ _ You’re  _ mental.”

“You’re doing the dishes,” Bodhi says, and walks out.

Jyn flips him the V, and changes the channel until she runs face-first into a  _ Doctor Who  _ rerun.


End file.
